Coronation by Computer
By 1974 the AP and UPI (as the UP had become) were waiting until after the bowl games to name their champion. This reform made sense, but because the two top-ranked teams often played in separate bowls, supremacy remained open to argument.
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So in 1998 the fathers of football came up with a plan. The six strongest conferences, in collusion with the four most important bowls, invented the Bowl Alliance–today the Bowl Championship Series. The coaches’ and sportswriters’ polls would be tossed into a hopper with various computerized ranking systems and something called “strength of schedule.” The hopper would spit out eight top teams guaranteed berths in the major bowls, and the top two would play for the national championship. Several bowls and awards and trophies by now existed to bless the champion, and the snazziest was the handsome Sears Trophy–a crystal football–given to the champion in the coaches’ poll. In 1998 the American Football Coaches Association agreed to give the Sears Trophy to whatever team came out on top in the BCS championship game. A ton of money was on the table–most of it from ABC, which cornered rights to the BCS bowl games–but the creators emphasized justice and clarity.
I’m not sure what Telander meant by that, and I bet he wasn’t either the morning after, but many a sportswriter got carried away. The whole idea of the BCS system was to enlist the computer to help choose teams for a title game that we humans would be most comfortable with. Instead, humans be damned, BCS spit out names that made sense only to the computer. HAL had taken over the spaceship. How often do sportswriters get to write jeremiads on the state of civilization?
Even Tranghese turned against science. “Get rid of the computers,” he said. “I hate those things.”
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The Red Streak version was leaner and meaner: “You can’t say I didn’t try to take a good high school senior portrait. The problem was I probably tried too hard.”
