College Football Insider: Is a College Football Playoff Coming Soon?

We have undergone another season dealing with the BCS way of determining the College Football champion and quite frankly it is still frustrating.  There are three teams that could be considered part of the National Title discussion and they are the Auburn Tigers, Oregon Ducks and TCU Horned Frogs.  

The winner of the matchup between the Tigers and the Ducks will be the BCS Champion while the Horned Frogs sit back and watch, helplessly.  They have ended the season undefeated and the only knock on their ability to win the BCS title is because they didn’t play as tough of a schedule as Auburn and Oregon did.  That puts them out of the BCS title picture.

There are many that feel that the way things are being done in college football isn’t entirely fair.  TCU deserves a shot at the national title and they weren’t given one.  How can this be rectified?

This is something that you have surely heard hundreds of times but the NCAA needs to institute a playoff system that allows for the teams to have a fair shot at the national title.  There are good arguments for and against this kind of system but one thing is for sure, something needs to happen to help make it fair for those teams at the top that don’t get a shot at the title.

So what kind of playoff system should come into place?  There have been many ideas that people have shared since the BCS first came into being back in 1998 as a way to solve the problem of giving a team the national title.  There was no formal system other than the polls (Coaches and AP) that could “accurately” tell who was going to be the best team in the nation.
Everyone thought that the BCS would change that.

It didn’t.  It left teams out of the running for the national title by punishing those conferences that weren’t part of the BCS.  Conferences such as the SEC, Big Ten and Big 12 could enjoy shots at the national title while conferences like the Mountain West, Sun Belt and Conference USA are not part of the BCS equation and are left out of discussion for the national title.

Some of the teams in these conferences have found a solution for this.  For example, TCU is moving from the Mountain West Conference to the Big East which is part of the BCS equation.  They did this so that they could have a shot at winning the BCS title.  Would more teams do this?  

It’s not a good idea to have teams switching conferences like TCU had to do just to get notice for the BCS.  Here is a way that we can avoid all of this movement in and out of conferences and make it fair for everyone.

The NCAA should create a playoff system that involves all of the conferences.  The SEC does something similar to what would work and the Big Ten is coming up with an idea for a playoff system as well.  What this would entail is allowing the top teams in each conference to play one another.  

The winner of those games can be seeded according to their record during the regular season and the playoff game or games that they play.  It can be something similar to the way that the NFL does their playoff seeding.  The top seeds can play the bottom seeds.  This would give teams a fair shot at each other and would separate the wanna-be’s from the real teams that are trying to win the title.

Then there can be a final four type playoff that puts the top four teams in a playoff much like they do with the NCAA Basketball Final Four.  The one that ends up on top can be declared the National Champion.

There are two problems with this scenario.  The first is that it would put the bowls, especially the BCS bowls, out of commission somewhat.  Perhaps the playoff games could be part of a bowl or something along those lines.  It would be a bad idea to get rid of the bowls and it’s doubtful that the NCAA would ever let the bowls go away so they would have to be incorporated into this system.

The polls that we have previously discussed would also not have much use in determining the national champion and may not have much use any longer.  They could be used to rank teams during the season but they wouldn’t have much use in the playoff system unless they would want to use them as part of the seeding process.

It would be nice if the NCAA would make it fair for everyone to take part in the process of declaring a national champion.  It would definitely halt the movement of teams from one conference to another and give everyone a fair shot.  This is something that has to happen.