College Football, An Explanation (Part 1): The NCAA, FBS and Conferences

I’ve been a fan of the NFL for a while now, but it was only toward the end of last College Football season that I became interested in the NCAA version of American Football.

As interested as I was, there was phrase that kept spinning around in my head: “Good god, this is confusing.”

Not the plays, nor the games themselves, but the organisational structure of College Football itself.

So, in an effort to educate both myself and anyone else who wants to know, I’m going to research, prepare and produce an explanation of College Football. From the basics, to the intricacies.

This is Part 1 of god knows how many. Today, we’re tackling the NCAA, the FBS and the Conferences.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (the NCAA) is the governing body for the athletic programs of many colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. NCAA Colleges are broken up into three divisions, Division I, II and III. Within Division I is the Football Bowl Subdivision (the FBS).

The FBS (formerly known as the Division I-A) includes 120 member schools, 117 of which are part of one of eleven conferences (the other three; Notre Dame, Army and Navy, are independents). It is the only NCAA-sponsored sport without an organised tournament to determine its champion. Instead, schools in Division I FBS compete in post-season bowl games.

Of the eleven FBS conferences, six are known as Automatic Qualifying (AQ) Conferences. This means that the champions of these conferences automatically qualify for one of the five lucrative Bowl Championship Series (BCS) games. The six AQ Conferences are the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Big 12 Conference, the Big East Conference, the Big Ten Conference, the Pacific-10 Conference (Pac-10) and the Southeastern Conference (SEC).

The champions of the other five FBS conferences don’t automatically receive bids to BCS games, and for this reason their conferences are known as non-Automatic Qualifying (non-AQ) Conferences. They are also often known as “Mid-majors”. These conferences are Conference USA (C-USA), the Mid-American Conference (MAC), the Mountain West Conference (MWC), the Sun Belt Conference and the Western Athletic Conference (WAC).

A conference champion is decided in one of two ways. If there are less than 12 teams within the conference, the champion is the team with the best record at the end of the 12 game season. If there are 12 or more teams, then the conference must be split into two divisions and a conference championship game is conducted at the end of each 12 game regular season.