How to fix College Football

I need an explanation of something and for once I would hope that it would be a valid explanation. For the past so many college football seasons, there has been a constant “debate” at the end of each season about the validity of the bowl season and/or the need for a playoff system. There probably isn’t another thing in sports that is guaranteed to produce arguments every year. Even the president elect is engaged by this stuff. I hope he has more important things on his plate to fix, but it still caught his attention.

You can probably set your watch to it. Every year, towards the end of the college football season, everyone will begin discussing this topic and it seems like there is no middle ground on this. People are either for creating a playoff system or for keeping the current BCS and bowl system as it is now.

I, like everyone else, have a very clear and passionate stance on this issue. After years or hearing all the discussion surrounding this and listening to various people come up with possible alternatives to the current system I came up with my own suggestion. I’m using this forum to propose my solution and at the same time I plan on sending this out to every possible media outlet and person/organization that is involved with college football in an effort to get a proper explanation or rebuttal to why this solution would not work.

As always, the comments of anyone reading this are greatly welcomed and appreciated.

I also acknowledge the normal setbacks and oppositions to playoff systems and have tried to keep them in mind when coming up with this solution. I will address the major oppositions as I go through this.

The basic premise to my proposal is to create a 16-team playoff as well as keeping some sort of bowl system intact. Most of the opponents of the playoff system sight a reason against it as that it would eliminate the bowls and the greatness that they bring to college football. With the addition of a number of different bowls over the years, we are currently looking at a college football bowl season that will run from late December through the first week of January and will consist of 34 different bowl games. That means that 68 of the 120 Division 1-A (or whatever it is called now) will play in a bowl game. That means more than half the teams will play in a postseason bowl. To me, that seems a little excessive, but I am willing to accept it as a reason if this is really a value to these teams.

The way I will hope to do this is by taking the 6 conference champions from the “power conferences” and then giving 10 at-large bids to the next 10 highest ranks teams in the BCS standings. It makes the selection process a relatively arbitrary process as there isn’t a selection committee that meets and determines the participants, like they do in basketball. The selection committee essentially becomes the humans who vote in the Harris and the USA today polls as well as the 6 computer rankings that are used to compile the current BCS standings. I have no problem with the BCS as a ranking system; in fact I think it’s a pretty good system, in that it combines a couple computer rankings and actual human polling. My problem with the BCS system is that it only matters in determining the top 2 ranked teams. Does it matter whether a team is ranked ninth or tenth? Not for any real purpose.

Each team, regardless of their conference affiliation, will begin their regular season on Labor Day weekend. All schools are back in session by then and it’s a great way to wrap up people’s summer season. Each team will play 12 regular season games with one “bye” week mixed in during the year. The conferences can determine how they’d like those games set up, if they want the teams playing 10 conference games and 2 out-of-conference games or if they want teams playing 8 and 4. The split would obviously depend on the number of teams in the conference and how they are set up. But that part would be left to the conferences to decided the structure. Therefore each team’s season would end the weekend before Thanksgiving, much like the Big Ten’s season ends now. Conferences who need to have a conference championship game can have them on Thanksgiving weekend. Then, the two weekends following Thanksgiving would be the first two rounds of the playoffs. These games would take place at the site of the higher seeded teams. This would eliminate the need for teams’ fan’s to travel for multiple weekends in a row (another argument the opposition makes). There would then be a one-week break for finals before the semi-final round taking place the weekend between Christmas and New Year’s. The National Championship game would then take place the following weekend after New Year’s or that Monday night following, if the NCAA is concerned about going up against the NFL playoffs. The semi-final and championship games would take place at the sites of the 4 BCS bowls, based on a rotating schedule, much like they are now, with the fourth bowl getting first choice of the non-playoff teams to play in their game (presumably the 17th and 18th ranked teams). The only stipulation would that the Rose Bowl would always be included in the 3-bowl mix since it has the longest tradition and would probably be the most opposed to the possibility of getting a lesser game once every 4 years.

Aside from the Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, and Sugar Bowl, the remaining bowls would stay intact and teams not involved in the 16-team playoff would be giving invitations as they are now. There are currently 10 teams that play in BCS bowls, so you would only be taking 6 teams out of the remaining bowls and filling their spots with other bowl eligible teams or by eliminating some of the bowls and consolidating the teams from there. To me, there should not be a reward for a team who finishes a season 6-6, which is all that is necessary for a team to be “bowl eligible.”

Those are the main elements of my proposal. Obviously there are minute details that would need to be worked out over time and logistical/scheduling issues that would need to be determined, but overall that is the basis for it.

Here is how the playoffs would set up this year. Since the conference championship games of the ACC, Big 12, and the SEC still need to be played this weekend, I’m going to make some assumptions on the results of those games. For argument’s sake, I’m going to say that Oklahoma beats Missouri, Boston College beats Virginia Tech, and Florida beats Alabama. Therefore the 6 automatic bids would go to the following teams: Oklahoma (Big 12), Florida (SEC), Boston College (ACC), Penn St. (Big 10), USC (Pac 10), and Cincinnati (Big East). The at-large teams would then be Texas, Alabama, Utah, Texas Tech, Boise St., Ohio St., TCU, Ball St., Oklahoma St., and Georgia Tech. I really don’t want to go through the whole breakdown here, but that is the essence of the whole system. You would then possibly end up with a game on Saturday the 27th of December between USC and Oklahoma in Pasadena, called the “Rose Bowl.” With the winner of that game advancing to the National Championship Sugar Bowl the following weekend in New Orleans to be opposed by the winner of the “Orange Bowl” semifinal in Miami between Texas and Florida. Would the Orange Bowl rather have Cincinnati against Boston College in a semi-meaningless game or Texas against Florida in a semi-final game? To me, it seems pretty obvious.

Essentially, there are a few generic arguments that I would like to make to enhance my point.
o Every system is going to bring about controversy. There is controversy surrounding March Madness each year as the selection committee is criticized for their at-large selections and teams complain that they should’ve been included. Team #66 is always going to complain.
o The purpose of this system is to keep the controversy at a minimum. You also would like to eliminate the possibility of a team going undefeated in a power conference and not having the chance to compete for a tile. I’d much rather have a situation where the 17th team in the country is complaining, as opposed to the 3rd or 4th.
o Every NCAA team sport (including the other 3 divisions of college football) currently has a playoff system of some sort in place to determine their champion. It seems somewhat inexcusable that Division 1-A college football is that much different.
o Most people who are in favor of the current system say that a playoff would ruin the college football regular season, where every game matters because one loss could end a team’s chances for a championship. I agree that this may take a little bit of that away, but I still think there will be intrigue in a lot of the games. While one loss may not end a team’s season (which is a ridiculous idea on its own) a loss late in the year (a team’s second or third) could knock them out of an at-large spot.
o Would there be less appeal to the Florida-Alabama SEC title game, since both would be assured a spot in the playoffs and would only be playing for seeding? Yes, absolutely. But conversely, would it not make the ACC championship game between Boston College and Virginia Tech so much more exciting as it would be a virtual play-in game since the loser would not be in the top 16 of the BCS. And also the Big 12 game, would give Missouri much more reason to play hard and beat Oklahoma since that would get them into the tournament.

As I said, I really feel like this proposal would work for all parties involved and really go a long way in helping to determine a true champion of college football. I would love to hear the opposition to this and to hear a true, legitimate reason to why the current system is better than this proposal.