A Proposal For Change in College Football's Regular Season

Everyday, someone somewhere proposes a new approach to a playoff system while trying to keep the bowl system intact. However, the recent outcry for a playoff system in college football has fallen on deaf ears. I, for one, am perfectly happy with college football having no playoffs. I enjoy the regular season and the bowl season with one small exception.

It seems that in recent times, the focus on a team's conference membership has escalated to absurd levels. A touch of pride in one's conference affiliation is not only reasonable, but a part of college football tradition.

Conference play also makes up the majority of one's schedule and therefore has a huge influence on a team's strength of schedule. However, college football fans and some sports journalists have turned this aspect of the game into an obsession. Too much consideration is given to conference affiliation while individual level of play is marginalized, in my opinion.

I am proposing an alternative to the regular season scheduling method as follows:

A fifteen game regular season with

• Five in-conference games
• Five games to be scheduled by the individual teams,
  allowing for more conference games, rivalries, etc.
• Five games to be randomly scheduled by a computer,
  but weighted to favor games between teams that finished near each other in the previous season's final rankings.

These games could be played in any order as far as I'm concerned.

The randomly selected opponents on a team's schedule gives the scheduling process some uncertainty and can create matchups we may not otherwise see. The weighting will increase the odds that teams play opponents near their skill level. These matchups can be scheduled at the end of the previous season so that fans and athletic departments can make travel and logistical arrangements. In-conference teams will be excluded from the randomly selected teams.

The five games that a team is responsible for scheduling gives the system flexibility. In the current system, a team usually has four games that it can schedule as it chooses.

The big change will be teams only playing five in-conference games. I don't feel this will diminish the game in any way. A round robin format can have all teams within a conference play each other at least once every two to three years. Additional in-conference games can be scheduled with the five games that teams are allowed to schedule as they like. Conference affiliation will not be as large of a factor when it accounts for only one third of the schedule.

One concern here is the length of the season—fifteen weeks followed by bowl games. I will not offer any solutions here but I will say that while difficult, a fifteen to sixteen week schedule definitely seems doable. Conference championships will be eliminated in this format.

Fifteen regular season games will give us a better chance to gauge a team's skill level than the current twelve to thirteen. This format provides many advantages to the regular season—flexibility, randomness, and a better chance to determine where each team stands on its own.

Any feedback is appreciated.