It is significant that the little 10 has both the most BCS bowl appearances and the most losses. Over-rated? Always!
Yesterday, we went back through every bowl game played in this century and broke down the wins and losses by conference. That story pointed out that while the national expectation is for the SEC to go undefeated each postseason, the reality is entirely different. As noted, the SEC has been much closer to the .600 mark over that span (in part because the SEC’s teams often face squads from other conferences who finished higher up in their own league’s standings).
Unfortunately, by stopping at 2000, we left the door open for a few Big Ten’ers to comment and email claiming bias — BIAS! Nevermind the fact that we didn’t even mention the Big Ten other than to show their record in table-form along with every other league’s. Again, the story was about the SEC, not the Big Ten.
But since we’ve been called out as blatant SEC homers who were working to sully the reputation of the great Big Ten, we’ve gone back and added in all the bowl games played in 1998 and 1999, too. Those were the first two years of the BCS system, you see. And the Big Ten had a great run at that time. We congratulate them.
That still has nothing at all to do with our initial post, mind you, but if we need to go back 15 years to validate the Big Ten and prevent a few Midwesterners from soiling their undergarments, so be it.
Below are the updated numbers for all the bowls played from 1998 until now (including Oregon’s win over Kansas State in the Fiesta Bowl last night). We look forward to the emails from some other league’s conspiracy theorists claiming that we left off 1997 because their league was really, really good back then.
| Conference | All Bowls ’98-’12 | BCS Bowls ’98-’12 | All Bowls 2012 | BCS Bowls 2012 |
| Big West | 2-0 (100.0%) | 0-0 | 0-0 | 0-0 |
| Big East | 46-28 (62.1%) | 8-7 | 3-1 | 1-0 |
| SEC | 70-50 (58.3%) | 16-8 | 3-3 | 0-1 |
| MWC | 32-24 (57.1%) | 3-1 | 1-4 | 0-0 |
| Big XII | 57-62 (47.8%) | 9-11 | 4-4 | 0-1 |
| Pac-10/12 | 41-45 (47.6%) | 13-7 | 4-4 | 2-0 |
| ACC | 49-55 (47.1%) | 3-13 | 4-2 | 1-0 |
| WAC | 23-28 (45.0%) | 2-1 | 2-0 | 0-0 |
| C-USA | 33-41 (44.5%) | 0-0 | 4-1 | 0-0 |
| Big Ten | 47-59 (44.3%) | 12-14 | 2-5 | 0-1 |
| MAC | 21-27 (43.7%) | 0-1 | 2-4 | 0-1 |
| Sun Belt | 9-13 (40.9%) | 0-0 | 1-2 | 0-0 |
And there you have it.
As you can see, we’ve had to add in the old Big West Conference — which hasn’t been a football conference since 2000 — thanks to Idaho and Boise State reaching the Humanitarian Bowl in 1998 and 1999, respectively.
You’ll also note that, if anything, adding in two more years of bowl results only makes it more obvious that the SEC has owned the past 15 years of major college football. Of the leagues whose teams play mostly teams from other major conferences in bowls, the SEC has been by far the best overall.
We’ve also corrected the BCS record for the WAC. Surprisingly, we didn’t get a single email from WAC fans claiming that we’d intentionally butchered their record as part of our obvious “take down the WAC” campaign.
We’ll leave you with a rundown of the BCS champions and their home conferences since the system was introduced in ’98:
| Season | BCS Champion | Conference |
| 1998 | Tennessee | SEC |
| 1999 | Florida State | ACC |
| 2000 | Oklahoma | Big XII |
| 2001 | Miami, FL | Big East |
| 2002 | Ohio State | Big Ten |
| 2003 | LSU | SEC |
| 2004 | Southern Cal | Pac-10/12 |
| 2005 | Texas | Big XII |
| 2006 | Florida | SEC |
| 2007 | LSU | SEC |
| 2008 | Florida | SEC |
| 2009 | Alabama | SEC |
| 2010 | Auburn | SEC |
| 2011 | Alabama | SEC |
