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Since 1998, every college football season has finished with the ongoing controversy regarding which teams play for the national championship. The dreaded BCS computers always seem to match up the wrong teams. In 2001, Colorado trashed Nebraska who in turn, ended up playing the in the BCS title game against Miami. It seems a playoff is the only way to do things, but how?
Here's my idea. We organize a ten-team playoff. Six of the ten teams will be the conference champions of the Big East, ACC, Big Ten, SEC, Big Twelve, and Pac 10. The other four teams will be the top four teams in the BCS that are not conference champions.
This guarantees that all of the major conferences have a stake in the national picture. But teams won't be getting screwed over by having multiple good teams in their conferences. Iowa won't have to worry about whether they will get a BCS berth while ranked #3 just because Ohio St. is #2.
Why ten teams? Having exactly 4 wild-card teams allows all of the conference champions to get a bye week in the playoffs. This means teams won't tank their conference championship game to rest up for the playoffs.
OK, now for the implementation. I designed the system around the fact that we typically want rivalry weekend to fall on the same weekend as thanksgiving. We also want the national championship played as close to new years day as possible.
Thanksgiving always falls on the fourth Thursday of November, between 11/22 and 11/28.
Here's a scenario for each of these cases. This computation is all centered around Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving |
Opening Day |
Rivalry Weekend |
Conference Championship |
Wild Card |
Quarterfinals |
Semifinals |
Championship |
11/22 |
9/1 |
11/22 - 11/24 |
12/1 |
12/8 |
12/15 |
12/22 |
1/2 |
11/23 |
9/2 |
11/23 - 11/25 |
12/2 |
12/9 |
12/16 |
12/23 |
1/2 |
11/24 |
9/3 |
11/24 - 11/26 |
12/3 |
12/10 |
12/17 |
12/24 |
1/2 |
11/25 |
9/4 |
11/25 - 11/27 |
12/4 |
12/11 |
12/18 |
12/25 |
1/3 |
11/26 |
9/5 |
11/26 - 11/28 |
12/5 |
12/12 |
12/19 |
12/26 |
1/4 |
11/27 |
9/6 |
11/27 - 11/29 |
12/6 |
12/13 |
12/20 |
12/27 |
1/3 |
11/28 |
9/7 |
11/28 - 11/30 |
12/7 |
12/14 |
12/21 |
12/28 |
1/4 |
The 'opening day' figure is calculated by making sure there are 12 Saturdays before Thanksgiving and the one during Thanksgiving weekend.
Criticism
With any system there is bound to be some criticism. I'll try my best to resolve it here.
- Number of games played. Having a conference championship and up to four postseason games is a considerable burden on a college football athlete. I would first cap the number of regular season games at 11. Each teams plays eleven games over a 13 week span as their regular season. Now, the worst case scenario is that a member of the SEC or Big Twelve plays an eleven game season, loses the conference championship and plays four games en route to the title. That's 16 games. In 2002 there are currently teams playing thirteen games schedules and then a conference championship game and a bowl game. That adds up to fifteen. The 16 game scenario is pretty unlikely anyways. The best case is that a team wins one of the other 4 conferences and then 3 postseason games, for a total of 14.
- Playing in December. College football players are also college students (we like to think that, at least). Almost every University has finals in December. This is a very valid point, however the NCAA basketball tournament almost always falls during finals week for most institutions with the quarter system. I'm not saying its right, but there is a precedent for doing it.
- What about the Bowl system? Bowls are played throughout December, and many of them will have passed when these teams are eliminated. Fortunately, most of the teams competing would likely fall into the more elite bowls, those played on or after new years eve, and almost definitely after Christmas. We could devise a system where the bowls are all assigned as normal after the season is over with the assumption that the top two conference champions will make it to the national championships. Then, for any bowl with a playoff team, that team would be replaced with an option to select a loser from the appropriate round. For instance, in 2001, Illinois played LSU in the Sugar bowl, Maryland played Florida in the Orange Bowl, and Oregon played Colorado in the Fiesta Bowl.
In this system, #4 seed Illinois and #3 seed Oregon are seeded to lose in the semifinals, so the Fiesta Bowl would have the first pick of semifinal losers and the Sugar Bowl would take the other. Maryland, LSU, Nebraska and Florida are seeded to lose in the quarterfinals. So the four quarterfinal losers would be picked by the Orange Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Fiesta Bowl and Orange Bowl (again). Finally Tennessee and Texas are seeded to lose in the wild card round, so the Citrus Bowl will have first pick of the wild-card losers, while the Holiday Bowl would take the other loser.
This system will be even better if we can guarantee a bowl between the semifinal losers, so we can guarantee each team at least one week to prepare.
This is just an idea I came up with and there are many other flaws to it, but I would be interested to see if it could be developed further.
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