A Solution to The Impossible: A 16 Team College Football Playoff!
For years we’ve heard the reasons why a college football playoff is impossible. A playoff takes away from the integrity of the regular season. It adds to the regular season and takes away from a student’s ability to study for exams. It would kill the bowl system.
Whatever. These are all nothing but B(C)S reasons to make some old rich men even richer.
Integrity of the regular season? I’m sorry, how many non-debatable champions have we had in college football? Unless the only two undefeated teams meet, there’s not a chance. Even when they do, someone will pull out the strength of schedule argument and say an unbeaten, such as Utah in 2008, played a weak schedule so they shouldn’t get a shot. And how strong ids the integrity of the regular season when several of the top ranked teams play 3 or 4 OOC games against cupcakes from the Championship sub-division? I don’t care how strong you conference is perceived to be. If you play a FCS team or the 3 newest schools to the FBS, you can say NOTHING about strength of schedule!
.jpg?w=256 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
Adds to the regular season and hurts exam schedules? Ok, maybe. If there wasn’t a bowl game scheduled pretty much every day from mid-December on already. As long as a playoff started no earlier than the 1st bowl game is now, how is it any different? I doubt it would happen because of the money they generate for big programs, but if you go back to 10 or 11 game schedules, is it really that bad? Or, drop the Conference Championship Game if need be (or one of those OOC Cupcake games). Even without that though, most conferences are done by early December anyway and take 2-3 weeks before the 1st bowl game is played. My plan would work within that system!
A playoff would kill the tradition of the bowl system? I don’t know why. How times have the Motor City bowl or Emerald Bowl been sold out? Other than fans from the schools and those watching on TV because there’s nothing else on, does anyone pay attention to the lower bowls? I can’t say that we’d be hurting anything that great. Traditions? The BCS is 10 years old. It was a change from tradition. It has failed, so let’s change it again!
The biggest argument about a playoff seems to be the number of teams involved and how they would be selected. Here you go: The eleven conference champions (however each conference selects its champion is up to them) get an automatic bid. Then take the BCS rankings from the end of the season and the top 5 ranked teams that are not a champion get the wildcards. That puts a lot of emphasis on wining your conference – so you can play your way in on the field – as well as giving teams who play in a “tough” conference a chance to slip up once or maybe even twice if we look at 2007. Of course someone will always be left out that might be good enough, but they had their chance! All they needed to do was win their conference!
Now, as for how seeding goes, you take the 16 teams, and seed them according to their ranking in the BCS standings. For the teams that are not included in the BCS rankings, have a committee seed them. They will likely be the bottom 3 teams anyways. Make no exceptions for playing teams from the same conference in any round. If we were to take the 2008-2009 season, here is how the seeding would look for the playoff:
1. Oklahoma (Big 12 Champion)
2. Florida (SEC Champion)
3. Texas (at-large)
4. Alabama (at-large)
5. USC (PAC-10 Champion)
6. Utah (MWC Champion)
7. Texas Tech (at-large)
8. Penn State (Big 10 Champion)
9. Boise State (WAC Champion)
10. Ohio State (at-large)
11. TCU (at-large)
12. Cincinnati (Big East Champion)
13. Virginia Tech (ACC Champion)
14. East Carolina (Conference USA Champion)
15. Buffalo (MAC Champion)
16. Troy (Sun Belt Champion)
So now comes time to play the games. Using this season as an example, begin the first round when bowl games start – December 19th. You could play four games on the 19th & four on the 20th, or play them all on the 19th. Which bowls do you use and how do you avoid disappointing ticket sales? Easy – Play double headers at the “next four” biggest bowls. These are open to interpretation, but going by bowl payout, You could use the Cotton, Capital One, Outback & Holiday Bowls. All usually host some of the top bowl games anyways, so not that big of a stretch You could also rotate new games in each year if need be.
Now, let the 4 top ranked teams pick in order which sire they want to use on the day pairings are released. #1 Oklahoma plays #16 Troy and selects the Cotton Bowl. The other game at that stadium is #8 Penn State vs. #9 Boise State. #2 Florida chooses the Capital One Bowl and plays #15 Buffalo, followed by #7 Texas Tech and #10 Ohio State. #3 Texas would face #14 ECU in the Holiday Bowl with a MWC grudge match to follow - #6 Utah vs. #11 TCU! In the Outback Bowl, #4 Alabama plays #13 and #5 USC plays Cincinnati. So now tell me, who doesn’t want to go to those games or at least watch them on TV?
Quarterfinal games are a week later – December 26th. Use the 4 major Bowls. Have these games pre-assigned or let the top 4 reaming seeds pick again. Imagine the Noon ET game being #2 Florida vs. Texas Tech or Ohio State in the Orange Bowl. At 3:30 ET, Texas takes on the winner of the MWC clash in the Sugar Bowl. At 7:00 ET, Oklahoma with a potential rematch vs. Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl and capped off by the possibility of a Alabama vs. USC SEC/PAC -10 battle at 10:00 ET in the Rose Bowl! Please! Who is going to honestly say that fans will not travel to those games! Talk about a boost to the economy!
For the semi-finals and final, use a rotation of the 4 big bowls, just like they do now, but make sure that no team plays in the same stadium 2 weeks in a row. The other option would be to have stadiums bid for the finals – just like the Super Bowl. Imagine the semi-finals on January 2nd and the Championship on January 9th. That lengthens the season by a whopping 3 days!
The money bought in would be huge! And payouts get split evenly in each round based on how many teams your conference still has alive. In the first round the BIG 12 would get 3 shares, the SEC, Big 10, and MWC get 2 shares each, and the remaining conferences get 1 share each. In the 2nd round (if results follow seed order), the Big 12 still gets 3 shares, the SEC gets 2, and the Big 10, PAC-10, and MWC each get 1. The better your teams do, the more money that rolls in!
Even for the lesser conferences, this is more money than usual. And for the BCS conferences, they have the possibility of getting as many as 10 shares! Obviously there will be flaws with this system. Nothing will ever be perfect. Dates may have to be tweaked slightly to accommodate NFL schedules. The seeding process may not be exact. But in the end, isn’t it all worth it to have a champion we all saw do it on the field?
.jpg?w=480 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
.jpg?w=600 "Colts Release Kenny Moore")
