College Football Playoff System
A playoff system will work for college football. The only absurd notion would be to try and get everyone, even anyone, to agree on it. The way I see it, if you only have a 2 team playoff, you aren’t gaining anything. The real problem is excluding good teams from the BCS bowls to begin with. If #1 Oklahoma loses the conference championship to a 7-5 Iowa State, the Sooners are automatically booted from vying for the national title and that’s a mistake. With a playoff system, legitimate teams would still have a shot. Do we really want a playoff made up of teams that weren’t even ranked, but won their conference championships?
Here’s how you have a 16-team championship. I know 16 is a lot, but if this will work, than certainly a smaller one would work better.
First, abolish the conference title games, which only exist to place teams in the BCS bowls, which won’t exist with a playoff system intact.
Second, no automatic bids awarded for conference winners; all teams will be chosen by a selection committee. However, stipulation could be made that any conference champ winning 9 or 10 games must be included.
Third, you must include the smaller conferences in some way. This means the Mountain West, C-USA, the MAC, the WAC and the Big East. If the small leagues aren’t included, then the NCAA should expect a lawsuit where the have-nots attack the haves for not including them in the bowl system. If smaller teams are required to play against bigger teams in a bowl system, then they must be given a chance for the big bag of bowl-game cash at the end. At a minimum allow smaller conferences to have play-in games to be in the Field of 16. If you don’t think 9-3 San Diego State and 9-3 Toledo are good enough to both be in the top 16, then lets them have a play-in game and take the winner. If every school in the country doesn’t have at least a shot at the playoff system, it won’t be worth dirt.
Assume the selection committee picks the following conference champs: ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Big East, C-USA, MAC, Mountain West, Pac-10, SEC, and WAC.
That’s ten teams. The remaining six will be at-large bids chosen by the committee.
Play the first 8 games the first weekend after finals are over, say four games on the 11th and four on the 12th of December on a Friday and Saturday. Use existing bowl games as the first round playoff games. Seed teams 1 through 16 and then play #1 LSU against #16 Marshall in the Sun Bowl. #8 Michigan faces #9 Virginia Tech in the Alamo Bowl, and so on.
The next 4 games could be played on Saturday the 19th, at the next best four venues.
The two semifinal games can be played the day after Christmas or on the 27th, in the Fiesta and Rose Bowls (rotating with Sugar and Orange); the final game can be January 2nd or 3rd.
In 2003 the Motor City Bowl featured the MAC #1 against the Big Ten #7. That’s pretty good I guess. However it might generate more interest or revenue if the Motor City Bowl was guaranteed to have the #1 ranked team in the country once every eight years. Instead of a 6-6 or 7-5 7th place conference finisher the bowl game would be guaranteed a marquis name. If not a marquis name, at least a conference champ.
We want conference champs in the bowl playoff system, don’t we? I thought so.
