Automatic Bids To College Bowl Games - BCS Games

BCS Games

The Bowl Championship Series consists of five games, the Rose Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Orange Bowl, and Sugar Bowl, as well as the BCS Championship Game. A composite system of computer rankings and human polls is used to rank the teams in the Division I–Football Bowl Subdivision. At the end of the season, the top two ranked teams meet in the championship game; the remaining eight slots are filled by the champions of six conferences (the Big Ten Conference, Pacific-12 Conference, Atlantic Coast Conference, Southeastern Conference, Big 12 Conference, and Big East Conference) and up to four "at-large" selections who finished the season ranked in the top 14 in the BCS rankings. These at-large selections can be granted to any FBS team, even those that aren't members of the six BCS conferences, though no conference may have more than two BCS teams in any given year with the sole exception being if two at-large teams from a BCS Conference finish No. 1 and No. 2 in the BCS Poll, they will qualify for the National Title Game while the conference champion from the conference will play in the conference's bowl tie-in.

Even in the five BCS bowls, consideration is given to historic associations between the conferences and the bowl games themselves. Tie-ins still apply, unless a team obligated to a certain bowl game is selected for the BCS Championship Game. In that case, their slot is filled by an at-large school. Any bowl that loses a contracted team to the Championship Game gets first pick of the eligible at-large schools. In the instance that the Pac-12 or Big Ten champion receives a bid to the BCS National Championship, the Rose Bowl is filled by either the second place team of the conference with the team that opted out, or if a "non Big-6"(a school not part of the major conferences) is ranked higher in the BCS standings they receive the bid over the second place team. This occurred in 2010 when Oregon played in the BCS Championship Game, and TCU (Mountain West Conference) filled Oregon's place in the Rose Bowl, not the Pac-12 second place: Stanford.