A Letter to the NCAA: Please Institute Title Games for All BCS Conferences

Dear NCAA,

As college football fans look at our calendars and see that the date is currently Nov. 27 (Happy Thanksgiving everyone, by the way), we realize that there is still a lot to be decided in college football.

For instance, Alabama and Florida are already all set to meet in the SEC Championship game, and it will more than likely decide who represents the conference in the national title game, and who will go to the Sugar Bowl instead.

Also, you have an ACC race that is still completely up in the air, and a Big 12 South that is rife with controversy over who should represent it in the conference title game against Missouri.

Finally, you have Notre Dame, who is just looking to coast into the Sun Bowl, but they have an enormous roadblock called USC in their way.

These issues, for the most part, will take two weeks to sort out. What are these two weeks lacking? The answer is Big Ten football, and I don’t like it.

This conference is one of the Elite Six that comprise the BCS, the system that you have chosen to determine our national champion. This conference has not only sent Ohio State to the slaughter two years running against Florida and LSU, but it also sent Illinois to get pulverized by a USC team that some people thought should have been in the National Title Game last year.

The reason I point out these facts is that they don't jibe with the notion that the Big Ten is one of those Elite Six. There are many things that stand in the way of this recognition amongst the American sports-loving public, but one of them is something that should be rectified immediately: The Big Ten should have a Conference Title Game. 

This discrepancy creates an unfair advantage for the Big Ten that most other conferences would kill for. Their top team is merely the one that has finished the season with the best in-conference record, not the one that had to go to a neutral site and fend off a team hell-bent on destroying them.

This creates champions who perhaps aren’t as battle-tested as those in other conferences, and the previous two seasons’ BCS performances help back up my point on that.

I am of the opinion that the Big Ten could do itself a big favor in helping restore some of its national splendor if they adhered to the following plan.

First off, let me say that I feel that a conference title game will not work if there are an odd number of teams in the conference. Therefore, part one involves attracting a 12th team.

Now, I know that they currently stand at 11, and that if they have 12 teams they might as well be called the Big 12 Part Deux. However, if they can attract another team to join from the MAC or from Conference USA, they could split into two divisions: an East and a West.

For the sake of my hypothetical arrangement, let’s say that Northern Illinois decided to join the Big Ten. You could split the conference down the following lines.

Big Ten East

Michigan

Michigan State

Ohio State

Penn State

Purdue

Indiana

Big Ten West

Illinois

Iowa

Minnesota

Northern Illinois

Northwestern

Wisconsin

Obviously, the champion from each division would compete in this conference title game, similarly to all the other ones throughout the nation. This game could be played in many places, including Ford Field in Detroit or at Lucas Oil Field in Indianapolis.

This move would be profitable for the Big Ten provided it could find a suitable title sponsor for the game, and they could run programming on the Big Ten Network touting the game, have in-depth perspective and behind-the-scenes access throughout, and even have the game simulcast on ESPN and BTN.

The best part of all of this would be that you could have it the week after the season ends, i.e. this week, the week BEFORE the other conference championship games would be played. This would make the game easily marketable, and a much better watch than some of the other fare available this week (can anyone say Notre Dame/USC?)

The idea of having a Big Ten Championship game is something I’m sort of surprised that the brass in the conference hasn’t given more serious credence to. After all, they were one of the final holdouts of the conference tournament trend at the end of the men’s basketball season, but they finally realized the financial and exposure gains they could make, and they went ahead with the idea.

Now, if the Big Ten goes ahead with this idea for a conference championship, I would say that the Big East and Pac-10 should follow suit as well.

But wait, you may say. It may be easy to tack on an extra week to the Big Ten schedule since they finish two weeks before other conferences, but the Pac-10 would be more difficult to do, since their last week is also the last week of the season.

Au contraire, mon frere. It isn't so difficult when you look at the schedules.  It just so happens that USC has THREE BYE WEEKS! Can anyone explain to me why USC, playing in the hapless Pac-10, needs three bye weeks? If anyone can, I’m all ears.

I think it should be a rule that if your conference is going to be in the BCS, then you have to have a conference championship game. In the interest of fairness, this is how it should be. It isn’t fair that the SEC, ACC, and Big 12 all have to beat up on each other for the entire season, and then play one more trap game the final week if the other three conferences don’t.

The splitting into divisions of the Pac-10 and Big East would be easier than the Big Ten, mostly because you wouldn’t have to add another school to make them equal in size. You could play the Pac-10 title game in San Francisco, Phoenix, or San Diego. You could also play the Big East title game in Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, or Foxboro.

Any of these options would be a far better one than just letting the regular season sort out who plays.

If you institute conference title games for each of these three conferences, it would serve two main purposes. One, it would provide more drama and intrigue for each of the titles. People would tune in to see if an upstart West Virginia squad could spoil Connecticut’s aspirations of a BCS berth, or if Oregon State could somehow foil USC yet again to snare a spot.

The other and more enticing option to these conferences is the money that could be drawn in. Who wouldn’t want to throw dollars in the direction of a major market like Boston, Phoenix, or any of the other cities mentioned?

These conferences could make themselves more money by having these games, and the exposure granted to their programs could prove invaluable in attracting donors and recruits, both precious commodities in the college game.

Am I saying that conference title games will help fix what’s wrong with college football? No, but it will certainly go a long way toward making these conferences more relevant in the future of the BCS, and perhaps will quiet some of the doubters who refuse to admit that these schools aren’t qualified to be in the biggest games of the college football year.

I hope that you will consider my proposals, and in the end, act upon them not only to help your members' schools, but to help continue to advance your brand.