Marshall Football: C-USA Alters BCS Formula to Decide Tie-Breaker

The results might be in, but the controversy surrounding the placement of Saturday’s Conference USA championship game is just beginning.

Marshall fans were chagrined Sunday evening upon learning that Rice would host this the title game. Due to both teams finishing with identical conference records (7-1), the BCS standings were used as the tie-breaker, well that was the idea any way.

Doug Smock of the Charleston Gazette provides an extensive report on how C-USA incorrectly interpreted the six computer rankings that make up one-third of the BCS Standings:

Instead of basing the computer indexes on the BCS's strict top-25 level, C-USA decided to award values based on a 1-through-125 scale. After dropping the highest and lowest rankings, the inverse totals were tallied and divided by 500, or four times 125.

Rice had the advantage here, which was Marshall's fear before it registered votes in the "human polls." The Owls' computer rankings were 49, 42, 43, 59, 54 and 44; the Herd's rankings were 63, 41, 56, 66, 56, 54.

So after dropping the highest and lowest and taking the inverse values, Rice had 314 points, 0.628 after dividing by 500. Marshall had 275 points, 0.55 after dividing by 500.

Using that system, Marshall's 0.1874 didn't measure up to Rice's 0.2093. With that, Saturday's game will be at Rice Stadium in Houston.

If C-USA had based the computer indexes on the BCS top-25 level, Marshall would have finished the week ranked 33^rd, 15 spots ahead of Rice.

C-USA has yet to comment on the discrepancy and it’s not known why the league decided to interpret the computer rankings differently.