GREENSBORO, GA. - North Carolina's Butch Davis, N.C. State's Tom O'Brien and Duke's David Cutcliffe hope to coach their football teams to national championships one day.

And they're happy to do it under the current BCS format.

"I like it the way it is," Davis said as coaches and players gathered in Georgia to talk about the coming season. "I love the bowl games, I like the fact that kids get a chance to be rewarded for having a great year and going 8-4 and 7-5 ... I would be crushed if the bowl games somehow, some way, were eliminated over the next six, eight, 10 years."

There's little chance of that happening.

In late April, Bowl Championship Series officials rejected a plan for a four-team, "plus-one" playoff model, opting to keep the current format. The national champion will continue to be decided by pitting the top two teams in the season's final BCS poll in a rotating bowl game until at least the 2014 season.

ACC Commissioner John Swofford, who is serving as the BCS coordinator on behalf of all the conferences, said Tuesday that the ACC presidents never officially voted on the "plus-one" idea because it quickly became apparent that other conferences wouldn't support it -- and the BCS needs unanimity among conference to make any changes.

"There would have been a fair amount of support for the plus-one model [among ACC presidents],'' Swofford said, adding he didn't know whether those supporters would have made up the majority.

The Rose Bowl's separate TV contract with ABC would have been a tall hurdle for the BCS had it wanted to adopt the plus-one format.

But there is also a comfort level in the current BCS system among many conferences, Swofford explained.

There are three reasons:

* Respect for the traditional bowl system.

* A time frame now in which bowls begin before Christmas and conclude before second semester classes start.

* The continued importance the bowl system places on the regular season.

Said O'Brien: "If there are no more than one or two undefeated teams, there's no purpose to going to a playoff. With 12 games ... it's tough to go undefeated. So you're playing for the national championship [from] the first game on."

Several ACC coaches, including Clemson's Tommy Bowden and Georgia Tech's Paul Johnson, said they would like to see some sort of playoff format, particularly if it is in conjunction with the traditional bowl system.

Virginia Tech's Frank Beamer said he also became a supporter of the plus-one model after the 2004 season, when his team played Auburn in the Sugar Bowl.

"They were undefeated with a great football team, a team that deserved to have a chance to win the national championship. And they got shut out,'' he said.

Davis, as the coach at Miami, had a similar experience after the 2000 season when his 10-1 Hurricanes played Florida in the Sugar Bowl rather than Oklahoma for the national championship. But he insists those situations are the exception to the rule.

"I've been a coach now since ... 1973, and I think back all these years, and there are very few years in that time span that it ever worked out that the right team didn't become the national champion,'' he said. "If you're getting it right 97 percent of the time, the other 3 percent -- which happened to us, the year we didn't get a chance to play Oklahoma, nobody should get a chance to complain more than me.

"But I still believe that what we're doing now is probably better than taking the eight best schools -- then everybody else, you're done for the year."

The three Triangle coaches agreed that the current bowl system works because it makes so many players, alumni and fans happy -- because they get to participate in the postseason.

"I think we have to be careful of shutting out a lot of people if we go to an eight-, 12-, 16-team playoff,'' Cutcliffe said last week.

Many of the cities and committees that stage bowl games also have argued that a playoff system would hurt regions that have seen economic benefits from the bowl games. At the ACC football meetings, many of the bowls with ACC tie-ins sponsored events for the coaches and media, and bowl organizers remain active in trying to preserve the historic system.

And even with a playoff, the coaches pointed out, there would be controversy.

"No matter what number you go to, whether it's No. 5 or No. 9 or No. 17, somebody's going to be mad,'' O'Brien said.

(Staff writer Ken Tysiac contributed to this report.)