The Peak of the BCS: College Football 2005

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 party, the BCS shifted to the dreadful “double hosting model” where the title game was played where it is currently — the 2nd weekend of January — but without any semifinals. It ruined the bowl season, it killed the BCS, and by 2011 was on the verge of killing the sport entirely before the playoff saved it.

Through all this disaster came the greatest season in the history of the BCS, culminating in arguably the greatest college football game ever played.

From the moment the 2004 season ended, Texas and USC were on a collision course. It rarely works out like that in college football. In 2005, it worked to perfection.

The two very best teams ended up meeting each other for the national title in a game that felt as big as any Super Bowl, and it brought the ratings to match. 35.6 million people watched the 2006 Rose Bowl, the largest TV audience of the BCS era and only one game in the college football playoff era…