College Football Playoff

Fall camps have started, Dallas played Cincinnati in a pre-season game, but lets face it--its still the dead of the summer. Now we don't even have the Tour de France to watch. Ironically enough, on EPSN.com they are running this story where the polled a number of college football players on whether they wanted to have a playoff. Here is the link. The majority wanted to have a playoff, but said that they would prefer 3 bowls compared to 1 playoff experience. Now, the bowl games are nice--you get swag and it is a fun experience partially because the majority of the bowl games don't mean anything. WHAT!?!? You mean people don't care about Wyoming and Fresno State playing in the New Mexico Bowl or whoever played in the PapaJohn.com bowl last year? It is a good experience for the team, the school and players. But now there are some many bowls and too many worthless bowls. Any body can make it to a bowl game now. I am fine with that, you can never have too much college football. On the other hand who wants to watch a week full pillow fights between middle of the pack MAC and C-USA teams?

The reason the this is ironic, is that while I was showering after playing basketball I had this same thought. I mentioned it to my brother. The bowl games were originally set up to get a good match up and have an exhibition game. They were never intended to choose a national champion. Recall the fiasco when you would have multiple national champions because one poll voted one team and another poll voted another. Even worse, the national champion often would play an inferior team in their bowl. For example, see BYU in 1984 when no one wanted to play them so they played a 6 and 6 Michigan. Enter in the BCS who "fixed" everything for us. Now we have a national championship game with the 2 best teams. OK, so its still screwed up, but we won't get into the politics here.

With that introduction, here is my plan. Why don't we do both? Have the top 10 to 16 teams in the BCS rankings make it in to the playoffs. The higher seed team will host the game, so it is a money making deal and an incentive to get ranked higher. The national championship game will still be at a neutral site. The other bowl games can still invite teams to come and play as an exhibition game as they were intended to be. This way, teams that don't make it to the playoffs can still have the bowl experience.



The major complaint against a playoff is the it makes the regular season games not as important (when was the last time we had an undefeated national champion??). This way, you have to remain in the top 10. A loss could be devastating. The other caveat is that the team has to win its own conference. We cannot have a national champion that does not win its conference unless the conference champion also made it in the playoff and lost in playoff competition. Another complaint would be that they are playing too late into the year. Give me a break. When did the NCAA start pretending to care about the student athlete's schooling? Every other division does it just fine. In fact, having 16 teams would only take 4 weeks to play the whole play off. It would be feasible for a play off team to play in the playoffs as well as play in a January bowl game. Another lame excuse is that of tradition. How many times did we need to see USC beat up on the Big 10 champ? The Rose didn't seem to mind when USC played Texas either. It is another lame excuse. Finally, we know that it is all about money. That will never change. Hopefully this idea helps lessen that stranglehold.

My point is that we can give the bowl experience to the same amount of teams and still be able to name a real national champion. The playoffs could even get corporate sponsors like a bowl game and give swag to the playoff teams. What are your guys opinions? I obviously wrote this on the fly and I am sure that there are kinks to iron out. Something to help ease the anticipation of the upcoming football seasons (pro and college).