A Way To Make The College Football Regular Season More Exciting

The 2009 college football season is more than halfway over, and so far it has been fairly exciting.  We have seen our fair share of upsets and last second nail biters.  

However, despite this excitement, the season still has the same pitfalls that it does every season.  Every year we are stuck with powerhouses playing cupcakes out of conference and the never ending debate of which conference is better.  I am here to propose a simple way to fix these two problems and make the regular season more exciting.

I think we should have a conference challenge system.  This system would be similar to the one that college basketball employs.  The set up will be as follows:

1) Two conferences are paired up and play each other.  

2) Individual team matches would be based on where they finished in the conference.  So the No. 1 teams would play each other, No. 2's would play each other, and so forth.  

3) Home field will be set up so that the two conferences get an equal amount of home games.  One conference will get odd seeds as home games and the other would get the even seeds.

4)  Once the teams are paired, it will be up to them to determine when they want to play. They can either choose early in the season before conference play starts or in the middle of the season when they have worked out all the kinks.  

5) The conference challenge will be used for all six BCS conferences and will rotate so that matchups would only be repeated every five years.  

There are obviously some issues that I missed over in those five points, but those are the main points.  

I think this system will solve a couple of problems with the regular season.  The first problem it will fix is teams scheduling cupcakes out of conference.  

I understand why teams do this. They don't want to lose out of conference and get knocked out of the BCS hunt. This would force teams to play competitive opponents and protect them from losing too much ground in the BCS because all the teams around them have the potential to lose.  

The debate of which conference is better will at least be partially answered.  Its hard to say which conference is better when they don't play each other and only lose in conference.  

Alabama almost lost to Tennessee and Iowa almost lost MSU.  Does this mean that those two teams aren't very good or just that the SEC and Big10 are deep conferences.  We would have a bit more clarity to this issue if MSU/Tennessee had played each other earlier in the season.  

Lastly, this would provide a lot more excitement to the early part of the season.  We all look forward to the annual matchup between OSU and USC. Now imagine if there were more games like that.  

I personally would love to see Florida vs. Texas in the second week of the season.  Think about it, we could potentially have the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the nation play each other in week two.  Now that's entertainment.  

Please leave comments and let me know what you think of this idea.