| abstract | - American football is enjoyed on more than one tier. While fans of the pros have the National Football League, fans of college football have their own leagues. Most schools of any size will at least have one sport; football is a popular one because a successful football team, particularly in the southern states, is a huge boon on prestige and enrollment. In some schools, it's the only men's sport - the federal Title IX requires equal amounts be spent on men's and women's athletics based on gross expenditure so a top-tier football program is a major resource hog by that standard even if the whole point of running it at that level is that it's a profit center for the school and the black from football makes up for the red most if not all of the other sports operate in. A collegiate football player's career begins in high school, with National Signing Day. Prospects, rated on a scale from one to five stars, are selected by the colleges of their choice and are given scholarships. College football players are not allowed to be directly paid, and schools face harsh punishment if they are found to have paid their players, directly or indirectly. The University of Southern California was found guilty of providing "improper benefits" to football player Reggie Bush in 2004 and 2005, and as a consequence USC was required to forfeit all the games in which Bush appeared after receiving the gifts, including the 2005 national championship game. The player himself was scrubbed from team records and university promotional materials. Many other schools have suffered similar fates, most infamously Southern Methodist, which is the only football program to have received the NCAA "death penalty", for over a decade of widespread payments to players. The combination of penalties (including two canceled seasons and 55 scholarships lost) and stigma (few players wanted to play for SMU after the scandal) was so damaging that it took 22 years before SMU, a former powerhouse, had its first winning season since the scandal. (By which point none of the current players had even been born when the scandal broke.) College football is played mostly on Saturdays, but there is at least one game every week on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. As with high school football, the playing season is basically the same as the fall semester, but some schools will play a defense vs. offense team scrimmage in the spring to make sure the players are keeping themselves in shape. There is a "bye-week" for most teams to give them some mid-season rest, although some teams use a Thursday for this purpose instead, while others, such as Penn State, play the entire season through without a break. Virtually all college football games are sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The NCAA is divided into four divisions: Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly I-A), Division I Football Championship Subdivision (formerly I-AA), Division II, and Division III. Each division, in turn, is divided into conferences of about a dozen teams who play most games amongst themselves. A handful of teams (most notably Notre Dame) are independent of any conference. Division I-A is the highest level of play and garners the most national attention. There is no officially sanctioned national football champion at this level, with the most widely acknowledged champions being chosen in polls of sportswriters or coaches, with a sole "national champion" being unofficially crowned if both polls agree and a split national championship if they don't. A number of "bowl games" are played between high-ranked teams at fixed sites in late December and early January, but they don't form any sort of organized tournament. The term "bowl game" comes from the earliest bowl, the Rose Bowl Game, which was named after the bowl-shaped stadium where it's played. There have been a few systems that have attempted to pair up #1 and #2 ranked teams in a championship bowl game; complaining about the systems is in some circles as cherished a pastime as football itself. Currently, the "BCS Championship Game" which rotates among the sites of four major bowl games functions as a theoretical national championship, and cuts down dramatically on split titles since many of the polls are contractually obligated to vote the winner of that game #1 in the final ballot. Very few actually like the BCS, but agreement on a better system is disputed, and there's a lot of money made in the current system. The lower divisions of the NCAA actually have national championship tournaments, but these divisions get little interest except from students and alumni of the participating schools themselves, and sometimes not even then. The rules of collegiate football are very similar to those detailed on the page about American football, so we won't go into them here save for the most basic explanation: 11 guys on offense, 11 guys on defense. Scoring is exactly the same as in the professional leagues as well. There are a few different rule changes, but nothing enough to disrupt the basic flow of the game. While professional football players can ostensibly play as long as they like (10-15 year runs are not uncommon and 20 years is not unheard of), a college football player's eligibility is more or less limited to four years. We say "more or less" because there is the option of redshirting, where a coach is allowed to stretch a player's eligibility to five years instead of four, with the stipulation that one of those years (most commonly the first) will be spent sitting on the bench, and that the player not participate in any games. Extra redshirt seasons are occasionally granted in extreme cases of injury where a player is sidelined for multiple seasons. Finally, a college player has the option after he is three years out of high school, if he so decides, to forgo the rest of his collegiate eligibility and enter the NFL Draft early. Also, a player forfeits his eligibility in a sport if he accepts a salary to play the same sport (but not a different sport - mostly notably a few high-profile college footballers have played minor league baseball) or accepts endorsements. The Football Bowl Subdivision has quite a few teams, separated, as stated earlier, into a number of conferences. There are a total of 11 conferences in D-1, not including the various independents - such as Notre Dame. You can find a list of the conferences here. The only major independents are Notre Dame, which has had a legendary place in the history of college football (they're the only team, collegiate or otherwise, who have a national television contract for all home games, and still have more national championships than any other team, despite the most recent occurring in 1988), and Army and Navy, the pre-eminent service academy teams. The Army-Navy game serves as the traditional last game of the season, and it is still televised despite both service academies having been out of top 25 contention for decades; the service academies have very strict academic and physical requirements (specifically weight limits) that preclude the ability to compete with more forgiving civilian schools. (That hasn't stopped the Air Force from being in contention every now and then, but they're the Air Force.) As of 2011 Brigham Young has left the Mountain West Conference to become the 4th major independent team. As stated above, the current college football system lacks a true playoff or a true national champion. However, at the end of the season, there are numerous bowl games that are played between schools. The four largest bowl games are the Fiesta Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Rose Bowl, and the Orange Bowl. A fifth national championship game will be played after these, with the #1 and #2-ranked teams in the nation playing each other. The BCS National Championship Game is played one week after the four largest bowls, and rotates between the stadiums of the four. For the first 8 years of the BCS, one of the four BCS bowls was the championship game (with the same system of rotation), but the 5th game was added in 2007. The second tier of games consists of lower profile bowls such as the Capitol One Bowl, Outback Bowl, Sun Bowl, Gator Bowl, Chick-fil-A Bowl, Cotton Bowl Classic and Alamo Bowl which are treated with some respect, but usually matchups among the teams in the middle of the pack of their conferences, with mid-major conference champions and major-conference runners-up making the occasional appearance. For many years prior to the implementation of the BCS, the Cotton Bowl was one of the top four bowl games, but was surpassed by the Fiesta Bowl and demoted to second-tier status by the time the BCS came around, mainly because of the condition of the Cotton Bowl stadium and heavy campaigning by the Fiesta Bowl contingent to up their game's reputation. It still seeks to regain its former status and become the fifth BCS bowl, and is now played in the showplace Cowboys Stadium to demonstrate this (the Cotton Bowl stadium itself remains in use by the decidedly less tradition-filled TicketCity.com bowl). The lower tier of bowl games exists solely as cash grabs and Padding for ESPN during the traditionally quiet holiday week in sports, and the stadiums and cities the games are played in (until ESPN grabbed a monopoly on most bowl games in the 1990's, most of these games were still few and far between, aired on syndicated broadcast television and were special). If there was a playoff in college football, the teams in these bowls would be blown out of the first round of the playoffs by the top teams or not even make it, as they usually have records which are only one game above .500 (if that). These games are usually sponsored by Names to Run Away From Really Fast, such as the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl, Little Caesars Pizza Bowl, Meineke Car Care Bowl, the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl, the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, or the Beef 'O' Brady's Bowl St. Petersburg. Many of these bowls used to have less embarrassing names, before the trend of sponsors using their own name as the sole name of the bowl (something near-universally loathed by football fans) came about. These games are solely of interest to the universities playing only (or will be a future Old Shame if your team is invited to the not-very-prestigious-at-all GoDaddy.com Bowl), and about the only accomplishment to be earned by the players outside of a free unwanted trip to Detroit, Boise or Birmingham, Alabama is a Cosmetic Award which means nothing. Unless the team lucks out and gets invited to the Hawaii Bowl. There now so many lower tier bowl games that a majority of FBS teams will play in a bowl game every year, a fact widely ridiculed by fans. In the 2010-2011 season, there was even some worry that there wouldn't be enough bowl eligible teams to play all the bowl games, which would have required teams with losing records to be invited to fill the remaining slots. While ultimately this didn't happen, it illustrates what a meager accomplishment being invited to a minor bowl has become. Obviously, as stated above, it's far from perfect, but it's also difficult for fans to agree on what exactly would constitute a fair playoff system. (Not to mention the difficulty in untangling the tens of millions of dollars in contracts made between the power conferences and the bowls themselves.) Oh, and the discussion is Serious Business. Even the United States Congress has gotten involved in recent years, in college football's own version of Executive Meddling , with some members proposing a law that would ban the BCS from being advertised as a "national championship" unless it were converted to a playoff system. To the surprise of very few, the most vocal proponents of this idea were Congressmen whose local schools were perceived as having been "screwed" by the BCS. There are pro-BCS and anti-BCS parties, and while the sheer fatigue from injuries might make an elaborate playoff difficult (though lower-division schools manage it), most feel something has to happen.
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