The Flexible Alternative To A College Football Playoff

College Football is the only major sport without a playoff, and that’s part of the allure of the sport. “Every Saturday in the regular season is like a playoff game” is the saying bragged about by avid college football fans. The saying is a lie of course; just ask TCU or Boise State or Cincinnati or a handful of other schools outside of the SEC or Big 12 or schools not named Ohio State or USC. With the SEC and Big 12 and Big 10 being the power brokers of college football, the conferences will do everything in their power to block a playoff system. The three conferences want to keep the antiquated bowl system in place, since they get a majority of the money during this season and the BCS is pretty heavily rigged in their favor. The bowl system isn’t going anywhere for a few other factors:

1. ESPN is the broadcasting giant in the mix with a majority of the bowls, and they make a lot of money off of the bowls and get good ratings even for bad games.
2. The athletic directors will fight to keep the system in place for added revenue and recruiting purposes. In a tournament system, there is only one ultimate winner. In the bowl system, there are 34 winners, and proud teams and athletic directors. Few people care if Marshall improved to 7-6 by winning the Little Caesars Bowl, but for the Marshall athletic department the win was huge.
3. Piggybacking off of that point. Most of the players in college football won’t go pro, so in many cases the bowl is the last time they will ever play football. I’m sure the players from TCU and Boise State would love a playoff, yet there are thousands of other players who are satisfied with the current system since it means they can leave the field for the last time a winner.
4. Money. The bowls are cheap to run and bring in a lot of revenue for a host city and create jobs and social gatherings and opportunities to skim off those revenues for more social gatherings. If the bowls weren’t such an easy money grab for a majority of the cities, the cities wouldn’t be clamoring to have some random 6-6 team play in December.

Amazingly the NCAA appears powerless or unwilling to make changes to create the most exciting buzz worthy event in all of college sports. In fact, besides in-game rule changes and the tweaks to the BCS, the NCAA has done little to improve college football during the decade, except for providing more of it. In 2005, the NCAA made a ruling to allow college football teams to schedule a 12th regular season game. Most big programs, like Florida, decided to use the game as a revenue grabber by scheduling powerhouses like P-U and Guam A&M.

My idea involves using the 12th game as a showcase of college football. Each team schedules their 11 games as far in advance as they want, and the 12th game is left open. Then after the bowl season, the BCS rankings come out and list the top 25 teams in the country. For my purposes, #25 has to be eliminated. The top 24 teams in the final BCS rankings would face another team from that list in their 12th game the next year.

The #1 team in the BCS would get to choose which team from the top 24 they would play next year, and this would continue until 12 nonconference games are created pitting the top teams from the previous year. The other college teams could have their own system or just schedule with no restrictions (they can even have it where teams that win bowl games get first choice). The flexible 12th game idea opens up a few intriguing concepts.

First, the idea of post-bowl season college football buzz, with fans trying to determine which teams will schedule whom, leading up to a big ESPN 12th game selection show. Second, the idea provides coaches and athletic directors control and some strategy in order to give them a better chance of making a BCS game. Games now are often scheduled years in advance by a different coach and staff.

Third, it allows the small schools an opportunity to get that marquee game at home. Boise State is basically begging for any opponent and can’t get one. The flexible 12th game would allow Boise State that shot if they earned it with an undefeated season the previous year.

I just did an example of games that could be created using the current BCS, before the bowls are completed. I used geography and some history to come up with the 12th games for next year using my system. The games could be:

#18 Oregon St at #1 Alabama

#12 LSU at #2 Texas

#8 Ohio State at #3 Cincinnati

#5 Florida at #4 TCU

#24 USC at #6 Boise St

#11 Virginia Tech at #7 Oregon

#16 West Virginia at #9 Georgia Tech

#22 Nebraska at #10 Iowa

#17 Pittsburgh at #13 Penn St

#15 Miami at #14 BYU

#21 Stanford at #19 Oklahoma St

#23 Utah at #20 Arizona

Most of those games would be a lot of fun, and would make September 2010 in college football more attention grabbing. LSU-Texas would be a massive early season game. Ohio and Pennsylvania would have large interstate games. Then of course you would have TCU and Boise State getting that huge home game they have desired forever. This system would allow for a wide range of scenarios and excitement in games that rarely ever happen. ESPN or CBS could make a lot of money off of the 12th game while maintaining their riches of bowl money.

One of the main issues to pulling this event off would be universities and conferences accepting the risk, especially when they make good money playing stiffs and hacks. The BCS committee could make a rule addressing this. If a school doesn’t accept this 12th game and schedules their own game, they become ineligible for a BCS bowl. Whether the NCAA and the BCS have enough teeth to enforce that is a whole different matter. It would be nice for the governing body of college football to prove that the regular season is special, while seizing a money making opportunity.