The Peak of the BCS: College Football 2005

Sean O'Leary
6 min readSep 28, 2022

The BCS always got it wrong. Until it didn’t in 2005. By then, it was too late.

In 1998, college football entered a brave new world that was supposed to fix the one thing that haunted the sport through the 1990’s — a true national champion. Four times in the decade, the sport produced two, and only two, undefeated college football teams. The problem was one of those teams were contractually obligated to the Rose Bowl.

The BCS was supposed to solve that. But college football being college football decided that having every season end with two undefeated teams was no fun, and decided to go a little nutty.

It began on the first Saturday in December 1998 when three teams — Kansas State, UCLA, and Tennessee — entered undefeated and only one remained. Despite “clean” seasons in 1999 and 2002, the norm was chaos. Florida State over Miami in 2000. Nebraska over Colorado and Oregon in 2001 despite losing its last game by 5 touchdowns. The entire 2003 fiasco, when the AP’s #1 team USC didn’t crack the top 2 of the BCS. And the gloriously stupid 2004 season where an undefeated Auburn didn’t play for a title.

Of course, you’d think the BCS would have transitioned into a playoff then and there, but you don’t know college football. Driven mostly by Congress poking around about non-BCS teams left out of the…

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