Critics of the BCS National Championship argued against the
internal validity of a so-called
national championship being awarded to the winner of a single postseason game. Critics lamented that the participants were selected based upon polls, computer rankings, popularity and human biases, and not by on-field competition, as in other major sports and all other levels of college football, which employed tournament-format championships. Often, the BCS system led to controversies in which multiple teams finished the season with identical records, and voters distinguished the worthiness of their participation in the BCS National Championship with no set of formal criteria or standards. The end of the
2010 season was one of the best examples of this. Without any objective criteria for evaluation of the teams, the BCS forced voters to impose their own standards and tiebreakers. Critics noted that the system inherently fostered
selection bias, and therefore lacked both
internal validity and
external validity. Controversies surrounding teams' inclusion in the BCS National Championship Game were numerous. In
2001,
Oregon, ranked second in the
AP poll, was bypassed in favor of
Nebraska despite Nebraska's 62-36 blowout to Colorado in its final regular season game. In 2003, USC was not included in the
championship game, but beat Michigan in the
Rose Bowl and ended up No. 1 in the final AP poll. The
following season, undefeated
Auburn,
Boise State, and
Utah teams were left out of the national title game (the
Orange Bowl). In 2008,
Utah was excluded from the BCS championship for a second time despite being the only undefeated FBS team and finished second in the final AP poll behind
Florida. In 2009, five schools finished the regular season undefeated:
Alabama,
Texas,
Cincinnati,
TCU, and
Boise State; however, the BCS formula selected traditional powers
Alabama and
Texas to participate in the BCS National Championship Game. In 2010, three teams, Oregon, Auburn, and TCU, all finished the year with undefeated records. While TCU statistically led the other two teams in all three major phases of the game (1st in defense, 14th in offense and 13th in special teams) the teams from the two
automatic qualifying conferences, Oregon (Pac-12) and Auburn (SEC), were selected over the Horned Frogs for the 2011 national title game. Many voters cited TCU's membership in the non-automatic qualifying
Mountain West Conference, perceived as having weaker teams, as one significant reason for their exclusion, despite TCU's undefeated regular-season records in both 2010 and the previous year. Adding to the controversy were comments made by the president of
Ohio State University,
Gordon Gee, who said that teams which played "the little sisters of the poor" instead of the "murderer's row" of teams in the automatic qualifier conferences did not deserve any national title game consideration. Gee retracted his statement and apologized after TCU defeated Wisconsin in the
2011 Rose Bowl (the Badgers had convincingly defeated Ohio State during the regular season). Many critics of the Bowl Championship Series favored a tournament with eight to sixteen teams, similar to those administered by the NCAA for its
Football Championship Subdivision (FCS),
Division II, and
Division III football championships. Others favored adopting the incremental step of adding a single post-bowl championship game between the winners of two BCS games among the top four ranked teams in the BCS standings, a so-called "
plus-one" option. On June 24, 2009, the BCS presidential oversight committee rejected the Mountain West Conference's proposed eight-team playoff plan. ==Post BCS==