Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. ? With a few weeks left to make a decision that will shape the future of college football, Bowl Championship Series officials are narrowing their options for adding a fifth game to their multimillion-dollar package.

BCS chairman Mike Tranghese said opinions among the six major BCS conferences and the bowls are changing frequently between models that would add a week to the season and those that simply would add a fifth game and leave the structure relatively unchanged.

“I couldn’t handicap it,” Tranghese said Tuesday. “I could tell you exactly what everyone’s position was of last week, and I could tell you that I think a lot of positions are changing.

“They’ve got to go back, got to study it, got to talk to their membership.”

What Tranghese does know is that models involving adding a week to the season still are meeting resistance from school presidents.

“I think it depends on how much value we can extract out of the models,” Tranghese said. “TV wants a playoff. They’ve been told, ‘No.’ Absent that, they want a plus-one.”

ABC paid $525 million to televise the BCS for seven years, ending with the 2005 season.

The fifth game is being added to give schools from smaller conferences a better chance to make the BCS.

Under one model, the championship game would pit the first and second-ranked teams in the BCS standings at the end of the regular season in a second game at the site of one of the current BCS bowls, the Fiesta, Rose, Orange or Sugar.

Another model, widely considered the one favored by TV and the public but least likely to pass, would take Nos. 1 vs. 2 after the first four BCS games were played and pit them in a title game the next week in the fifth bowl.

The biggest advantage of a championship game a week later is that it would create a Super Bowl-like week of hype and would stand alone as the biggest college game of the year.

The disadvantage is that it would diminish the games being played the week before, especially if one were being played at the site of the title game, which presumably would get the least-attractive teams of the eight to play during BCS week.

The logistics of the plans are still be worked out, but Tranghese said the Rose likely would be interested only if it could keep its traditional Pac-10 vs. Big Ten game in the three years it doesn’t serve as host of the title game, unless those teams are ranked first or second.

The other option would be to add a fifth game and rotate the title game among the five, which is how the system works now with four bowls.

“It’s a process,” Gator Bowl executive Rick Catlett told the Florida Times-Union.

Although BCS officials don’t begin negotiating their new contract until September, the Rose Bowl starts talking with the Big Ten and Pac-10 in June, and that’s the deadline the BCS has set for deciding on how to handle the fifth game. The fifth game will start for the 2006 season, the first year of the new BCS contract.