The BCS recently signed a four-year, $125 million deal with ESPN to televise the BCS national championship game, and the Orange, Fiesta and Sugar bowls, starting January 2011 and running through the 2014 bowls.

The current deal with Fox runs out after next season. The Rose Bowl has its own separate TV deal with ABC that runs through January 2014.

ESPN purchased the rights to the current BCS format.

While the network would not stand in the way of a format change, Burke Magnus, ESPN senior vice president for college sports programming, said it had no intention of pushing the BCS toward the mini-playoff system, known as the plus-one model.

"We don't think it's our role to influence the format," said Magnus, who also spoke to FWAA.

The six conferences with an automatic bid to the BCS are the Southeastern Conferences, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Big East, the Pac-10 and the Atlantic Coast Conference.

The BCS has just completed the first year of a four-year cycle, in which it evaluates the conferences to determine which will receive automatic bids. The formula used by the BCS takes into account the ranking of the best team in the conference, the number of top 25 teams and the rankings of all the teams in the conference.

Swofford said it is possible the BCS could expand the number of conferences with automatic bids in 2012.

The BCS also is about to begin negotiations with its bowl partners and there's no indication that there will be a change in a lineup that now includes the Orange, Sugar, Fiesta and Rose bowls.

Swofford said the bowl partners prefer to continue the double-hosting format in which the championship game rotates between the sites, so that once every four years a bowl hosts two games played about a week apart.