The reason I've never really gotten "into" college football is because I dont' understand it. All the end of the yr bowls confuse me, and so does the ranking of all the teams. If someone could be so kind as to explain all of this to me, it would be wonderful! My son plays high school football and really has his hopes on playing division 1 when he goes to college, so he's had the games on today and it appears this may become a weekly thing if we don't go anywhere on a Saturday!

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Colleen

Ha ha! I am the same way, I don't get it! DH makes me watch it though, I usually just get up and clean!

I see your siggy has changed! Congrats on the baby on the way

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Thank you! I'm really excited and just taking it day by day...praying this one sticks!

I'm glad I'm not the only one that doesn't get it! I noticed the defensive pass interferance penalty is different in the colege games and they have many more penalties all together than in the NFL games....well, not that Pats this weekend....they played on a college level...IF that!

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Colleen

Hi, Colleen! I need to stop in here more often. Let's see if I can explain at least a little bit of this to you. It is pretty confusing.

At the end of the season (before the bowl game) a team must have 6 wins to get to a bowl game. There are the four BCS bowl games: The Fiesta Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Rose Bowl and the Sugar bowl. These are the BIG bowl games and they rotate each year which one is the championship game. This year it's the Rose Bowl. So the #1 and #2 teams (in a perfect world not the imperfect world of polls which I will explain in a minute) in the nation play each other. The other three bowls are usually a mixture of teams from the top ten and/or teams who won their division championship. Like the the team who wins the Big 12 title automatically goes to one of the BCS bowls. The rest of the bowls (and there are a lot of them) get teams from certain divisions. For instance the Holiday Bowl teams will be the #2 team from the PAC-10 and the #3 team from the Big 12, the Capital One bowl will be the #2 team in the Big 10 vs. the #2 team in the SEC.

The polls that determine the rankings of the teams is the really confusing part. There are a few different polls. The BCS is the main poll, but that poll doesn't come out until about half way through the season. There are also the Coaches Poll and the Harris Poll (a new one this year) that the BCS takes into consideration when it puts together it's poll. The AP poll is the other poll and up until this year was used in the BCS poll instead of the Harris Poll.

So, here's what happens... The coaches poll is made up of coaches from the NCAA. The Harris poll is a panel of over 100 former players, coaches, administrators and current and former media. In each of those two polls they choose the top 25 teams every week. When the BCS poll starts up it uses a computer program of some sort to put together it's top 25 teams. One third of the program is the Coaches poll's top 25, one third is the Harris Poll's top 25, and the other third is some computer ranking system.

This whole BCS mess is something that a lot of college football fans have strong feelings about. People either love it or hate it. A lot of people hate it because it's not necessarily always the "best" two teams playing for the national title. A team might be second in the Coaches poll and the Harris poll, but once the computer rankings are factored in they end up 3rd in the BCS poll and therefore (since the BCS poll is all that matters when it comes to the BCS bowl games) don't get to play in the national title game.

Ok, are you more confused now than you were before you started reading this post?

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YOu just confirmed what I thought was going on except I didn't realize there were 3 polls, but I did know that there were "votes" that didn't necessarily represent the best teams, which is why I didn't get it. And, I still don't get why they'd do it this way and will just assume it's because rather than dividing up the division 1 teams, they opted for the polls. Stupid!

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Colleen

The big mighty dollar is probably the main reason they do it that way. The more bowl games they have the more universities that get money. Every team that plays in a bowl game (win or loose) gets some money. The BCS games pay out more than the other bowls. They would be hard pressed to get universities to go along with a playoff system since that would mean they wouldn't get any money unless they ended up in the championship game. It also equals more money for the NCAA in general. Hence the only people pulling for a playoff system are the fans. And unfortunately we don't really get any say in what happens.

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Oh, yeah, money will win every single time! Oh well!

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Colleen