The Glitch That Stole Christmas From The Pac-10

Abstract

The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) employs a multi-criteria decision model (MCDM) to determine eligibility to play in the most elite college football bowls at the end of the season.  MCDM’s are widely used in business and government to make important decisions, including those with tremendous financial impacts.  The BCS college bowls have the biggest payouts involving several million dollars.  This year, the PAC-10 could have been the first football conference to place two teams in the BCS bowl.  What a Merry Christmas that would have been!  The payout would have been $2.75 million or $275 thousand per team.  Unfortunately, due to the use of a faulty MCDM that distorts the relationship between those football programs considered, a glitch in the BCS formula stole the Rose Bowl prestige and the money from the PAC-10 during the Christmas holidays.  Using appropriate multipliers, the economic impact in PAC-10 communities could have been very significant.   The implication for future competition through enhanced athletic facilities, for example, could have a sustained economic impact for several years in those communities.  It will be demonstrated in this paper that had the BCS employed a valid and consistent algorithm for determining a final score, even with the BCS’s own data, the University of California would have a higher score than the University of Texas and the PAC-10 would have benefited by $2.75 Million, and they would have a much merrier Christmas than they had from playing in the Holiday Bowl.