EBS Awarding of Byes

Overview

One important feature of the Enhanced Bowl Season (EBS) tournament is the four first round byes. These byes are available to the four highest-ranked conference champions or qualified independents ranked in the Top 6.

Methods

The four first-round byes serve several important functions:

Provide further incentive for the highest ranked teams to maintain their top positions, thus ensuring an advantage gained by not having to play in a pre-New Year's Day game.
Elevate the importance of the regular seasons by prohibiting non-conference champions from earning byes, making the conference schedule (the majority of a team's season) all the more important.
Provide a mechanism for conference champions to be placed in the bowls with which they have traditional alliances.
Avoid non-compelling first round matchups such as those that would exist in a 16-team playoff. Also, minimize the number of first round games, thus permitting games to exist in the current bowl format, minimize interference with final exams, and allow for better television coverage.

Details

Earning Byes

Teams may earn one of the four byes by either winning their conference or, in the case of independents, finishing in the top six of the rankings. The four highest ranked teams to meet this criteria earn the byes. All conference champions, whether they are from yearly-qualifying conference schools or merit-qualifying conference schools, are eligible to earn byes.

The restriction that only conference champions may earn byes also helps ensure that those conferences with conference title games are not unnecessarily punished when it comes to earning byes. Since these title games often involve the two best teams in the conference and the loser typically falls in the polls, there would be an advantage given to those conferences without a title game if byes were given only the four highest seeded teams. From 1998-2007, only nine teams in the EBS tournament were ranked in the top 4 and did not earn byes (i.e., were non-conference champions ranked in the top 4).

The restriction placed on independents ensures that they have risen to a particular level of achievement in order to be eligible for a bye. Since these teams do not have to beat out other teams for a conference title, it is important that teams who do are protected. The minimum level of sixth is selected as this is the median position of the final bye spot as it would have been issued from 1998-2007.

Seeding

The seeding of the four bye teams is based solely on the ranking of these teams, with the highest ranked team earning the number one seed.