Basically, I hate the BCS system. And while I would rather go back to the old days of just having the AP and Coaches determine the national champion and just have great bowl matchups without all this #1 vs #2 nonsense wrecking things like the Rose Bowl (Ohio State should be in the Rose Bowl dammit), no one else seems to agree with me. The basic consensus is that a playoff system would be optimal.
My playoff proposal is an attempt to keep the bowl tradition alive, while trying to meet this playoff fetish everyone seems to have and to prevent the BCS computer guys from losing their jobs. So here it is:
Basically, it is a straight up bracket. The winners of the 12 conferences plus 4 wild cards for a 16 team playoff. They will play in 8 first round bowls: Liberty, Peach, Fiesta, Independence, Holiday, Citrus, Hall of Fame (name will be changed back from the Outback bowl at gunpoint) and the Las Vegas Bowls. The winners will go on to play in the Sun, Cotton, Gator and Tangerine Bowls. Then the Sugar and Orange. The championship is held on New Year’s Day in the Rose Bowl.
The orders of the Bowls were decided by seniority. Rose Bowl is the championship because it is the oldest by far. Sugar and Orange are the next two oldest, both formed in 1935. Sun, Cotton, Tangerine and Gator are the next oldest, etc.
Similarly, the seedings will also depend on which bowl game a team initially starts out in, with the older beginning bowls getting the higher ranked team. For instance, the #1 seed will play the 16 seed in the Liberty Bowl, since it is the oldest of the first round bowls and so gets the first seed game. Peach Bowl gets #2 vs #15, etc. Las Vegas gets the #8 vs #9.
The seedings will be determined by the BCS computers.
I like my idea because it keeps the tradition of the bowls alive and gives us a playoff format. It may be less onerous for the bowls and be cause for less strenuous opposition from them because they would be kept around. Plus, it keeps the bowls more relevent than the current system which makes everything except the championship bowl unimportant on the national level, which may help advertising. In fact, it will increase ratings for some bowls like the Tangerine, Citrus and other little ones that seem to get no publicity nowadays. The other bowls can be kept around for novelty value and college paydays, they just don’t get to be part of the playoff structure.
While I suppose objections could be made about where each Bowl is placed, it’s not really important. I just picked seniority because it’s easier, you could easily replace the Tangerine Bowl with the Fiesta Bowl in the playoff order if you’d rather do it by prestige.
So any thoughts and opinions besides the fact that it won’t realistically happen due to the money stranglehold?