Official Usage
BCS officials consider all 124 members of Division I FBS to be a part of the BCS system, stating on its official website,
The media and others often mis-use this term. All 11 conferences in the Football Bowl Subdivision are "BCS Conferences."Of these teams, 120 are members of one of 11 conferences; the other four are "independent" schools that are not part of a conference.
The BCS system is broken up into two separate types of conferences: Automatic Qualifying (AQ) Conferences and Non-Automatic Qualifying (non-AQ) Conferences. The champions of the six AQ conferences receive automatic bids to BCS bowl games, regardless of their BCS ranking.
The other five conferences (listed below) are considered non-AQ conferences or "mid-major" conferences because they do not receive an annual automatic bid to a BCS bowl game. The highest ranked champion of any non-AQ conference will receive an AQ bid if they are ranked in the top 12 of the final BCS poll or ranked in the top 16 and higher than a champion of an AQ conference.
The conferences in this group are:
- Conference USA
- Mid-American Conference
- Mountain West Conference
- Sun Belt Conference
- Western Athletic Conference
The three independents other than Notre Dame are Army, BYU and Navy, and all field non-AQ football teams.
Four "non-AQ" teams have appeared in the six following BCS games:
- 2005 Fiesta Bowl: Utah (MWC) defeated Pittsburgh (Big East) 35–7,
- 2007 Fiesta Bowl: Boise State (WAC) defeated Oklahoma (Big 12) 43–42 in overtime,
- 2008 Sugar Bowl: Hawaiʻi, (WAC) lost to Georgia (SEC) 41–10,
- 2009 Sugar Bowl: Utah (MWC) defeated Alabama (SEC) 31–17,
- 2010 Fiesta Bowl : Boise State (WAC) defeated TCU (MWC) 17–10
- 2011 Rose Bowl, TCU (MWC) defeated Wisconsin (Big Ten) 21–19.
- 2013 Orange Bowl Northern Illinois Huskies (MAC) against Florida State Seminoles (ACC)
Of these appearances, all were via automatic qualifying bids, except the BSU participation in the 2010 Fiesta Bowl in which BSU was selected via at-large bid.
Note that Utah and Boise State have multiple appearances. Utah became a member of the Pac-12 Conference in 2011, and TCU joined the Big 12 at the start of the 2012 season, thus becoming part of several schools in the BCS era to move from a non-AQ conference to an AQ conference (others being University of Louisville, University of South Florida, and University of Cincinnati).
All FBS teams' results and rankings from the 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 regular seasons will be used to determine whether a seventh conference earns automatic qualification for the 2013–14 bowl games.
Read more about this topic: Automatic Qualifying Conference
Famous quotes containing the words official and/or usage:
“No sane local official who has hung up an empty stocking over the municipal fireplace, is going to shoot Santa Claus just before a hard Christmas.”
—Alfred E. Smith (1873–1944)
“Girls who put out are tramps. Girls who don’t are ladies. This is, however, a rather archaic usage of the word. Should one of you boys happen upon a girl who doesn’t put out, do not jump to the conclusion that you have found a lady. What you have probably found is a lesbian.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1951)