“Back then, teams were rewarded for playing softer schedules and moving up by attrition,” Anderson says. “There was also a lot of East Coast bias.”

So the two buddies began crunching numbers in Excel to rank teams on a more objective, numerocentric basis. They started submitting their picks to media around the country, and their data was so reliable that they struck a deal with the Seattle Times in 1994 to syndicate their picks.

Four years later, Anderson and Hester were approached by then-SEC commissioner Roy Kramer to become one of an exclusive group of mathematical-ranking providers, for which they’d receive an “honorarium” for their work.

Little did Anderson and Hester suspect that they were cementing their legacy as founding members of the most hated college-football entity in the United States. For more than a decade now, the biggest controversy in NCAA football hasn’t been concussions, the influence of shady agents or the exposure of illegal recruiting practices, although every one of those infractions certainly exist.

No, it’s the Bowl Championship Series, the much-maligned and mysterious compendium of computer rankings and opinion polls that decide college football’s year-end bowl-game pairings, including the national championship game. This year’s selections are scheduled to be announced Sunday, and a new round of criticisms is sure to bubble up as it does every year.

Almost since its inception in 1998, the BCS has been the sport’s favorite whipping boy, an omnipresent ideal for those claiming a traditional playoff system would heal the game’s ills. Critics claim the BCS discriminates against smaller schools that dominate lesser opponents, that a school like Texas Christian will get screwed out of a shot at a national championship because computers say (as of Thursday, at least) that Oregon and Auburn are most deserving of playing each other in Glendale, Arizona, come Jan. 10, 2011.

But the BCS isn’t what you think.

There is no towering corporate office. Its notorious computers aren’t located in some guarded, all-white room in Langley, Virginia. In fact, according to executive director Bill Hancock, for all its control over big-time college football, it’s hard to even call the BCS a governing body. “Some people think we’re this evil corporation in charge of college football,” he says, “but that’s just not the case.”

Despite its cultural impact, the BCS is tiny. It staffs just three people: Hancock and two part-time office assistants. And it’s headquartered out of the director’s suburban Kansas City home. “I don’t give out my address,” he says with a laugh, “because I don’t want someone egging my house.”

Jeff Anderson's laptop calculates his BCS rankings through Excel spreadheets.

Regarding his job description, it reads more like that of an event manager than CEO. Things like securing insurance, TV contracts, ticketing, and sponsorships — similar to what he did as director of the NCAA’s men’s basketball Final Four. Only on a much larger scale now.

In fact, everything about college football today is done on a grand scale. Millions of dollars are pumped into local communities, thanks to roving bands of fanatics, and books like Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer have taught us that college football might as well be religion in some areas. All of which, BCS critics say, is why the system should be scrapped and replaced with a traditional bracketed playoff.

That would be a radical departure for the sport, but then again, the BCS itself was a radical departure when it was ratified in 1998 by the 11 conferences that qualify for annual bowl games. For all the mystery that surrounds how the BCS operates, the organization still answers to every one of those 11 conferences, which help “manage things on the ground,” according to Hancock.

At its core, the BCS is a simple system. Two-thirds is human opinion: one-third from the USA Today Top 25 Coaches Poll and one-third from the Harris Interactive College Football Poll.

The remaining one-third is an average of six independent “computer rankings.” Hancock likens their proprietary formulas to that of the Coke recipe, but he emphasizes that the BCS “requires them to tell us how they operate,” and “independent audit” system evaluations are conducted.

And while mathematical rankings predate the BCS by decades, the new process promised to be the first system combining consensus opinion with numerical analysis into a single ranking. “I think it’s perfect,” Anderson says. “Two-thirds art, one-third science.”

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Authors: Blake Snow

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