After five meetings and many months of deliberation, the BCS commissioners and Notre Dame athletics director Jack Swarbrick endorsed Wednesday a four-team playoff model for college football.

If the model is approved by the BCS presidential oversight committee, it will take effect in 2014 and scrap a BCS system that has been in place since 1998. The committee will meet June 26 in Washington, D.C.

The new plan is to have four teams, selected by a committee that considers criteria like conference championships and strength of schedule. The two national semifinal games would be played within the existing BCS bowl games (Fiesta, Rose, Orange and Sugar) on a rotating basis. The highest-bidding city gets the rights to that year's national championship game.

"We're very unified," Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany told ESPN.com. "There are issues that have yet to be finalized. There's always devil in the detail, from the model to the selection process, but clearly we've made a lot of progress."

Wednesday's meeting marks the fifth time the BCS commissioners have met since the national title game in New Orleans in January. Southeastern Conference commissioner Mike Slive compared the process to a marathon.

"My hope is we've done 26 [miles]. My hope is we have 0.2 to go," Slive told ESPN.com.

The presidential oversight committee includes a representative from each of the FBS conferences as well as Notre Dame. The committee will consider other models, too, including a plus-one format that was proposed by presidents in the Big Ten and Pac 12.

If the four-team model is not approved, the committee would direct the BCS commissioners to go back to the drawing board.