Replacing what was known as the Bowl Alliance, the Bowl Championship Series is the most recent effort to crown a National Champion. The commissioners of the Conference and Notre Dame AD are the administrators of the BCS. Through a qualification system that identifies the teams that will meet at the end of the season for the National Championship, they are the two teams that obtained the highest qualifications.

Originally, the BCS consisted of four bowls, namely Rose, Sugar, Orange and Fiesta, but from the beginning
of the season in 2006, a fifth BCS game has been added, serving as the championship game. This system simply means that instead of the original eight teams that will play in BCS games, the fifth bowl will be added. The championship game will rotate between the four BCS stadiums. This year’s championship game will be held at the Fiesta with next year’s game at Sugar, then Orange and the Rose.

There are three elements that serve as the basis for the Bowl Championship Series: the Harris Interactive Poll, the USA Today Coaches Poll, and the Computer Rankings. Only the interactive Harris Poll and the USA Today Coaches Poll are manually operated. These two human elements are in charge of gathering and combining all the votes of the specific voters at the end of each week. Once the votes are collected, the relative strength of each team will be calculated through a special formula, where a perfect score is 1. The teams that follow will be assigned a number less than the number 1. The final average of BCS of a team is determined through an average arrived at the three elements.

In 2005, the AP decided that it no longer wanted to be involved in deciding a national champion, so the NCAA created the Harris Interactive poll. Harris Interactive is a market research company specializing in Internet research. After it was commissioned by the NCAA, Harris Interactive developed a poll for college football as a replacement for the AP poll. 114 voters drawn from a group or past and present players, coaches, administrators, and media included the poll. Each week, the top 25 teams are identified through votes submitted by poll voters. The first survey is sent out only in the second half of September and no longer passes a survey before the season or in the postseason.

The USA Today Coaches Poll, the second of two “human” elements, is comprised of members of the American Football Coaches Association who make up 61 Division 1-A head coaches. Each of the head coaches sends out their ballot containing their top 25 picks each week. Unlike the Harris Poll, the Coaches’ Poll also sends out a preseason and postseason poll. The team that automatically gets the number of votes is the winner of the BCS National Championship and also the winner of the Waterford Crystal National Championship Coaches trophy.

The last of the three elements is the computerized survey. Consisting of six different calculations, each of the programs was created in 1998 with the inception of BCS. The six people responsible for the programs are Anderson & Hester, Richard Billingsley, Colley Matrix, Kenneth Masey, Jeff Sagarin and Peter Wolfe. The computer program does not use a margin of victory and each uses different formulas to calculate schedule strength. Teams also go through a top 25 ranking with the computer poll. The computer element is created through the four computer classifications used by each of the teams. The highest and lowest teams in the computer rankings are discarded and the remaining four are averaged.