Death to the BCS : The Definitive Case Against the Bowl Championship Series

by Wetzel, Dan; Peter, Josh; Passan, Jeff

• ISBN13: 9781592405701
• ISBN10: 1592405703
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-10-14
• Publisher: Gotham

Summary

A team of award-winning sports reporters takes down the Great Satan of college sports: the Bowl Championship Series. Every college sport picks its champion by a postseason tournament, except for one: Division I-A football. Instead of a tournament, fans are subjected to the Bowl Championship Series, an arcane mix of polling and mathematical rankings that results in just two teams playing for the championship. It is, without a doubt, the most hated institution in all of sports. A recent Sports Illustratedpoll found that more than 90 percent of sports fans oppose the BCS, yet this system has remained in place for more than a decade. Built upon top-notch investigative reporting, Death to the BCSat last reveals the truth about this monstrous entity and offers a simple solution for fixing it. Death to the BCSincludes findings from interviews with power players, as well as research into federal tax records, Congressional testimony, and private contracts, revealing: The truth behind the "Cartel"-the anonymous suits who run the BCS and who profit handsomely by protecting it The flawed math and corruption that determine which teams participate in the national championship How the system hurts competition by perpetuating "cupcake" schedules How "mid-major" teams are systematically denied a chance to play for the championship How a comprehensive sixteen-team playoff plan can solve the problem while enhancing profitability The first book to lay out the unseemly inner workings of the BCS in full detail, Death to the BCSis a rousing manifesto for bringing fairness back to one of our most beloved sports.

Author Biography

Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter, and Jeff Passan write for Yahoo! Sports, the most read sports site on the Web. Wetzel has coauthored four books, including the New York Times bestseller Resilience: Faith, Focus, Triumph with Alonzo Mourning, and lives in Michigan. Peter is an award-winning investigative journalist who has earned national attention for his reporting on the Bowl Championship Series. In 2005, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a series on race and high school football in the South. He lives in Los Angeles. Passan has won multiple Associated Press sports editors awards and lives in Kansas.