In college athletics, the only sport that does not have a playoff system is Division I-A football.Seven years ago the commissioners of the ACC, Big XII, SEC, Pac-10, Big Ten, Big East and University of Notre Dame created the Bowl Championship Series, a computer system that determines the two teams that participate in the national championship game.
The four major bowls that highlight the BCS are the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, Rose Bowl, FedEx Orange Bowl and Nokia Sugar Bowl. The national championship game rotates sites between the four games every year.
Before the BCS, the national champion was decided by the Associated Press and the ESPN/USA Today football polls, polls that were voted on by members of the media and Division I-A head coaches.
Since the conference champions have exclusive rights to the four major bowls, other teams are excluded from different conferences.
The ACC and Big East have rights to the Orange Bowl, the SEC has rights to the Sugar Bowl, the Pac-10 and Big Ten have rights to the Rose Bowl and the Big XII has rights to the Fiesta Bowl.
When the national championship is in its regular rotation, the layout of the teams and the match-ups are selected from the top 15 BCS teams. This only leaves two at-large spots for the other 111 teams in Division I.
One problem that the BCS didn’t foresee was a split national champion. The BCS was created in order to prevent that from happening until the USC Trojans and LSU Tigers split the title in 2003.
At the end of the season the AP ranked Rose Bowl champion University of Southern California as the No. 1 team in the country, while the ESPN/USA Today poll, tied directly to the BCS national championship game, had Sugar Bowl winner LSU its No 1.
Since then the cry for a national playoff to determine a “true” national champion has gotten louder.
“I’d like to see a playoff because computers shouldn’t determine who plays for the national championship, players should,” Cody Cardinale, manufacturing engineering sophomore from Morgan City, said.
Another Nicholls student who would like to see a 1-A playoff is Brent Bonner, marketing junior from Berwick.
“A playoff would solve the controversy of the BCS,” Bonner said. “It’s way too complicated and football shouldn’t be that way.”
The system can be fixed, taking the top 16 teams in the computer rankings and having a national tournament is an option.
If the Nicholls State football team continues to win, it will claim its first title since 1984, when the Southland Conference was known as the Gulf Star Conference.
After that Nicholls will participate in the I-AA playoffs, using the same system that is used in Divisions II and III.
Sixteen schools are selected in the playoff system, so even if the Colonels do not win the automatic conference bid, they could still be selected as one of the eight schools that receive an at-large bid from the selection committee.
However, the presidents in Division I strongly oppose this.
“There is simply no sentiment for a playoff,” David Frohnmayer, head of the BCS presidential oversight committee, said on ESPN.com. “It is opposed, and opposed strongly by our presidents.
