BCS Proposal To Go "Retro" for Title Game and Bowls Is Right Call

For those of you college football junkies under 35, you may be sick of New Year's Eve as an overrated night out filled with too many "rookies," but those of us who went to school in the early '90s, it was a lot more fun...

...mainly because we could look ahead to the annual New Year's Day hangover recovery session in our favorite sports bar watching meaningful bowl games.

This week at their annual meeting in San Francisco,  the BCS elite made a series of fairly similar proposals that gained some traction. They all had one thing in common—that the BCS would only be responsible for setting the stage for a No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup in the BCS Championshp Game.

And that means the remaining 34 bowls would possibly be on their own to dictate matchups irrespective of conference tie-ins from year to year.

Those bowls will try to create the most attractive matchups and hopefully ignite some controversy, create new rivalries and help college football reclaim New Year's Day as the best single day on the American sports calendar.

Granted, my Sun Devils have had only one New Year's Day big game experience in my lifetime (Ohio State rallied to beat us in the '97 Rose Bowl), but that didn't diminish my love of New Year's Day until the BCS was formally introduced in 1998, replacing the Bowl Alliance (1995-97) and the Bowl Coalition (1992-94).

Under those formats, the major bowls were spread out over a week leading up to the No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup.

There is no question that the major bowls, aside from the No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup, have become so anticlimactic that you really don't care about an Oklahoma-UConn Fiesta Bowl or a Wake Forest-Cincy Orange Bowl unless those games matter in your $20 college bowl pool.

Is it me or are you sick of the same matchups year after year in the Capital One, Chick-Fil-A and Outback Bowls?

Let's apply the new proposal and tweak it just a tad.

Let's add the always-mentioned but never implemented "Plus One" option and match the No. 1 vs. No. 2 after the major bowls on New Year's Day. The title game would be played on the Saturday in between the NFL Conference Championships and the Super Bowl. The schools and the fans would have three weeks to plan their trip to the title game after the bowl victory.

That is one of the most underrated problems in trying to implement a cookie-cutter 16-team NCAA playoff format in football; alumni and fans just can't travel three or four weeks in row and factor in Christmas, especially in this economic environment.

The Plus One format actually gives the non-AQ, non-BCS conference schools a fighting chance to get to the championship game since they will have the opportunity to be matched up during the bowl round with a power conference team.

A 13-0 Houston team would have a fighting chance at the title if they could prove themselves against a once-beaten Alabama or Oklahoma. TCU and Boise State, after winning BCS bowls in the past few years, might have gotten a title shot under a Plus One format.

Now that Oklahoma State is presumably out of the running after the upset in Ames, let's assume LSU survives Arkansas and either Georgia or South Carolina in the SEC Championship. Also, projecting Oregon runs the table as well, we have theoretical final regular season BCS standings of LSU, Oregon, Alabama, Clemson, Oklahoma and Houston.

Provided that we keep a traditional Big Ten/Pac-12 Rose Bowl matchup, this is what New Year's Day could look like:

1:00pm ET: Cotton Bowl—Clemson vs. Oklahoma

3:30pm ET: Rose Bowl—Michigan State vs. Stanford

5:00pm ET: Sugar Bowl—Houston vs. LSU

8:30pm ET: Orange Bowl—Oregon vs. Alabama

That's a pretty good day of viewing for us college football junkies. Imagine the atmosphere and the crowd at the sports book in Vegas that day!

The cool part is that all the top six BCS teams would all be alive for the title game since it's not just if you win, it's how impressive you look against top competition. In other words, if Houston upsets LSU, Alabama barely beats Oregon and Oklahoma blows the doors off Clemson, who goes to Glendale, Arizona for the title game?

The remaining 30 bowls would have much more compelling matchups as well since the individual committees could recruit schools like in the old days where they tried to create matchups that had storylines and viewer interest.

You could have traditional powers like Florida State and Nebraska meeting in the Outback Bowl or Notre Dame vs. Boise State at the Holiday Bowl in San Diego or even West Virginia vs. Penn State at the Chick-Fil-A in Atlanta.

The bottom line is that going "retro" with a Plus One format would drastically improve the quality of the all the bowls, heighten TV ratings and level the playing field between the current BCS and non-BCS programs. Schedules will improve since the rankings will matter—you just can't coast in nonconference games and walk into conference play at 3-0 or 4-0 every year and impress the bowl committees.

But most importantly, my early afternoon Bloody Mary will taste just a little better on January 1st every year since college football will rightfully have taken New Year's Day back for us.