About the Bowl Championship Series (BCS)
The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) is a five-game arrangement for postseason college football that is designed to match the two top-rated teams in a national championship game and to create exciting and competitive matchups among eight other highly regarded teams in four other games.
It has been undeniably successful in achieving those goals. Additionally, it has provided more access to the major bowls, more television exposure, and more postseason revenue than ever before.
The five bowl games are the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, the FedEx Orange Bowl, the Rose Bowl Game presented by Citi, the Allstate Sugar Bowl and the BCS National Championship Game that is played at one of the bowl sites.
The BCS is not an entity. Instead, is an event managed by the 11 NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision conferences — all of them "BCS Conferences" — and the University of Notre Dame through a series of contracts among bowls and television networks. The conferences are Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Conference USA, Mid-American, Mountain West, Sun Belt, Pacific-10, Southeastern and Western Athletic.
Representing their constituents, the conference commissioners and the Notre Dame athletics director make decisions regarding all BCS matters, in consultation with an athletics directors advisory group and subject to the approval of a presidential oversight committee whose members represent all 120 Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly known as Division I-A) programs.
The BCS games are operated by community-based organizations in each of the host cities. In addition, there are 29 other postseason bowls, which are managed independently by entities in 26 cities around the nation and in Canada. All bowl games provide meaningful season-ending opportunities to teams.
This robust system of many post-season bowl games offers rewards for teams and places a great premium on the regular season. Football weekends are an important ingredient in the overall college experience — going well beyond simply what occurs in the athletics department. For many institutions, a significant amount of the revenue that supports all athletic programs is generated by regular-season football. Regular-season football weekends also permit universities, alumni, and other supporters of higher education to build and maintain close and lasting relationships. A thriving bowl structure helps ensure that the regular season remains strong and vibrant.
While seeking to preserve and enhance college football's unique traditions, the BCS arrangement aims to bring some sense of finality to each season by pairing the top two teams in a national championship game. The top two teams were matched in bowl games infrequently before the BCS, when conferences were contractually obligated to certain games and there was no flexibility to attempt to match the top teams.