College football playoff system, a solution.

Great Debates
1

I have a proposal on how to have a playoff system and a true national championship in Division I-A. Of course, my plan is not perfect, but I think would be a good framework to keep most parties happy in the end.

1.) Play 11 games during the regular season. (Not 12 or more) These 11 games will be played during a 13 game span. The season will start in mid-August. many teams in the south or midwest can use one of their “bye’s” here, or schedule a game in a coller climate, for example, Texas vs. Boise State or Alabama vs. Penn State. All 11 games must end before Thanksgiving.

2.) Conference championship games do not count. If a conference has a championship game, this game needs to be played by Thanksgiving or before. Also, a win in this game will cancel out a loss a team might have beforehand. For example if Team A is 10-1, and plays Team B which is 11-0 and Team A wins, Team A will be 11-0 and Team B will also be 11-0. (I hear a debate here).

3.) Bowl games would be included in the playoff. But only 16 bowl games, with 32 teams. These bowls were be “certified” on the basis of payoffs per team, facilities (size mainly) and average attendance these games have had in the last 10 years. The bowls can bid for their best match-ups, similiar
to what they do in the BCS now. But instead of having 4 BCS games, there are now 16 BCS bowls. This would be more fair to mid-major conferences, like the C-USA, Big East (will be), WAC, Mountain West and the MAC, who get screwed out of the present system
These games will start around 12/10 and end by Christmas Day. The other 10 bowls can play their games whenever they want.

4.) The 16 winners will be seperated in half and sent to one of two host cities. Four games (two in each city) will be played on Friday, the other four games on Saturday, right after the New year.

5.) The “final four” will play in the last host city no later than the first week in Janruary. The two games will be played on a Friday and the championship on Sunday afternoon. The National champion will have played 16 games.

Problems with my plan:

1.) Time would be my enemy, I want the championship played before about Jan. 10th, as not to go over into spring semester. This means pushing the first games back to August. Playing football in August is brutal, especially in the south and midwest, where most football lovers live.

2.) Will people be interested in going to my semi-finals and finals football games? I think it would be a bonanza in the TV ratings.

What does everyone think?

2

I don’t think it really needs to be that complicated.

Just do a playoff among the Top 8 according to polls.

3

Let controversy reighn, it will anyway.

Return universities to institutions of learning with athletics as an entertaining sideline among students rather than a multimillion dollar commercial enterprise.

Dream on, Simmons, dream on.

4

Could we make that “reign?”

5

Sorry, but any playoff system whatsoever must include the major bowls as they are now, played on Dec 31st or later. Tradition is just too big a part of it. The Rose, Orange, and Sugar have always been played on Jan 1 (as far as I can remember, except the past few years when they might play on Jan 2 or 3 or 4).

I see one option this way - end the season around the same time you say. Then you take the top 8 teams (not sure how you do this, or if you name 8 conferences and take their champs, or whatever, but you get to 8 teams). These 8 teams play a quarterfinal, the higher ranked team playing at home, sometime the week of Dec. 13 - 20. Then, the semifinalists play each other in a regular Jan 1. bowl game - either the Rose, Orange, Sugar or Fiesta. These four bowls can rotate hosting a semifinal. (Not sure what to do about the losers in the quarterfinals).

Then, a new bowl is created - which isn’t so much a “bowl game” as we know it, but is basically the NCAA championship. This is played the weekend following the weekend of the bowl games (in other words, somewhere between Jan 8 - 12).

Alternatively, just bloody go back to the way we used to do it, before the BCS. Having grown up partially in L.A., it was great to see a traditional PAC-10/Big-10 matchup in the Rose Bowl. There will always be controversy…so maybe we shouldn’t have fixed what wasn’t really broken?

6

2 games in 3 days? Not in American football, you need to find a way to separate it by a week, or at least 5 days, the minimum in the Pros (Sunday-to-Thursday)

7

Well, here’s another fly in the ointment:

Suppose the #1 team is the only top 8 team undefeated. They play their bowl game (currently that would be against the #2 team). They win.

Why penalize them with another game?

Bob Stoops actually applied this to the current delima vs his 2000 Championship team. And… he said if a split Championship exists under the BCS system… then there is a split Championship that year. The system still works. (Those are a paraphrase of his words)

Bottom Line: No system will satisfy everyone.

For instance, suppose the 8th and 9th teams (or 16th and 17th, depending on how long to make the tournament) are separated my 13/100ths of a point? And one of those two teams had to play a conference championship and the other didn’t? You still have contraversy. Remember Nebraska, Colorado, and Texas?

I don’t have any answers, just more fuel for arguments. :slight_smile:

8

You can piss off all of the football fans some of the time and you can piss of some of the football fans all of the time, and I’ll bet you can also piss off all of the football fans all of the time.

9

Not only does tradition dictate that bowls be played close to New Years (eve or day), but ending the season before Thanksgiving would screw up the tradition of the many rivalries played around Thanksgiving. The BCS system has screwed around with tradition too much already.

10

Come on, it may be that not everyone is going to be happy, but any playoff system is better than just about everyone, except for the people that run the BCS, being unhappy with the system. A debate over the 8th and 9th teams in the country I can live with if it creates a true national champion.

        There are still little debates here and there about the NCAA college basketball tourney, but would anyone argue that it is not a great system that is exciting, simple and effective?  

           The BCS/Bowl system can definitely be improved upon.  You can't just throw up your hands and say, "No system is perfect" and give up.  

          I say create an 8 or 16 team playoff that somehow incorporates the Major Bowl Games.  This means the Rose, Cotton, Sugar and Orange Bowls.  You could continue to play them on New Years Eve/Day.  These would be the quarterfinal games.  Have two more weeks after this for the semifinals and National Championship.  You can use the Fiesta and some other bowl if you'd like for these.  Or maybe rotate the other Bowls.  I don't care.  Except for these four bowl games, there is no "tradition" in the games that is going to be ruined any more by moving them than has already occurred by selling out their names to the highest bidding corportation.  No team is just dying to make the Outback Bowl.  No kid grows up dreaming of going to the Mobil Bowl or whatever the other bowl games are called.  

      As for whether this will cause more problems for the "student-athletes", it could not disrupt them anymore than college basketball does.  They play the NCAA tourney over 3 weekends and have Thursday and Friday games the first two weeks.  And it is in the middle of the semester.  Football is played on Saturday.  Nothing they do could screw up the supposed academic schedules of the football players as the basketball tourney does to the basketball players.  Heck, they play mid-week games for 2 months out of the year.
11

I think we should just do away with a uniform championship altogether. There’s no way to do a playoff across the entire football spectrum. So give out a trophy for the AP poll, another for the coach’s poll, and whoever else feels like chipping in. It’s always going to be subjective, and there’s nothing wrong with subjectivity.

An alternative I would like is if we did this crazy thing where we actually used the division system. I mean, how many times do we need to see Syracuse get the living babuddha out of them? Set a maximum number of teams in each division to accomodate a real playoff system over the normal season. Then each division gets a couple bowl games. That way, you get a lot more good matches, instead of a few good ones and a godawful lot of mass violations.

I figure it would cause friction at first, but once schools figured out that moving down a rank could put them at a competitive advantage and make their games coverage-worthy, that should turn around. Not that it’ll happen, but hey.

12

I heard in a radio report yesterday that Mike Tranghese (Chair of the BCS) indicated that the format will remain the same. It seems that the persons who would make the decision to change, university presidents and chancellors, are in no hurry to do so. Why should they? There is some very big money to be made by probably about a dozen schools (& their conferences); and some very good money to be made by two to three dozen more.
Bowl games are often awarded on how a team “travels”, sometimes sperceding won-loss records. The more cars and hotel rooms their fans rent, the better they travel. The fans have three weeks or so to make arrangements to make their big trip; nearly all of the bowl games are between the holidays, when many businesses close for vacation, enabling more fans to travel. If a playoff system were in place, there would be more dates to factor in, and many of these big games would offer these fans only a week to make arrangements. There would be fewer fans spending less money. The sponsors would make less money. The schools would make less money. imho

13

You mean no more fashion awards?