The BCS clean-up

I feel that it is universally accepted that the BCS is not a good way to decide a national champion in college football. The best you can get from a BCS 'supporter' is that, barring a playoff, it is the best solution. That is like saying that the best way to avoid unwanted pregnancies and STD's, barring abstinence, is a condom. There is a perfectly good solution, and everybody knows it could be successful, but there would have to be sacrifices made... in the case of college football, the sacrifice would have to be made by the BCS and their beloved BCS bowl games.

For a long time, I thought that a playoff was a no-brainer, but as I was pondering the idea this morning, I came up with a couple of potential showstoppers, as well as the usual challenges and issues in the debate over a playoff.

• The first issue that everyone goes to is the number of teams. Obviously, since football is a hard-hitting sport that can only be played on a weekly basis and takes a massive physical toll on these young men, a 65-team tournament like they do in basketball is out. A plus-one concept has been brought up by many, and it would definitely be the simplest option with the easiest implementation... the only problem is that, in today's college football world with so much parity, a four-team playoff would probably be open to as much criticism as the 2-team playoff that we currently employ. I think that the BCS's goal has it right... the point of the exercise is to determine a national champion. If you have 12 teams vying for #1 in a playoff that is structured similarly to the NFL, you could live with the fact that teams ranked from #13-16 are feeling left out... If you didn't play well enough to be considered by the polls and the computers as one of the top 12 teams in the country, you probably aren't national championship material.
• The next issue is deciding on the teams. If the BCS had their way, they'd still want to keep their automatic bids and at-large rules intact when determining the playoff teams. I think that the automatic bids are a bunch of crap. When you consider that the Big East and ACC don't have ANY teams ranked better than 16 (Florida State) and 20 (West Virginia), you have got to come to the conclusion that automatic qualifiers need to go away. This would obviously be a hard sell to the BCS conference monopoly.... Maybe the automatic qualifier rules could be rewritten to state that if a conference champion is not ranked in the top 15, they will lose their automatic bid (unless that team beat a top-12 team in the conference championship game... then they get a wildcard bid for defeating a team that would otherwise have qualified), and if a conference has more than 2 teams ranked in the top 12, they get to send more than two teams to the playoffs. I'd prefer to just send the top 12 as determined by an end of season computer ranking that is similar to the BCS formula and seed them as such. The top 4 get a bye week and the bottom 8 play to determine who the 'elite 8' are. The benefit to doing this would be that it makes the regular season VERY important. Teams will look to ensure that they have a strong 'resume' in order to qualify for the national championship playoff.
  
• The next issue is the rankings. All 'official' preseason rankings must go away. The only reason that they exist is to ensure that there is hype over games that occur early in the season. Remember how Virginia Tech was ranked #6 to start the season? They have clearly improved since their loss to 1-AA James Madison, but it is also clear that they aren't a top-6 team. Remember #4 Florida and #15 Pittsburgh? How 'bout #16 Georgia Tech and #23 Georgia? Or what about unranked Stanford? These rankings are silly, but the worst part about them is the fact that the people that make them are prideful human beings.... They don't want to be wrong, so when the SEC has 6 teams in the preseason top-25... they just cook up the excuse that it is the power of that conference that has those teams losing or beating up on clearly inferior opponents... and they stay ranked ahead of teams that are winning... and beating quality opponents. Let's take Florida... they had 4 absolutely unimpressive wins against horrible teams to start the year (one was against Miami (OH) where they had 29 total yards in the beginning of the 4th quarter). They remained in the top-10 throughout. Had the rankings come out after those 4 games, Florida would probably have been amongst 'others recieving votes' if the voters were basing it purely on the quality of play. It took 3 straight losses (one to a good Alabama team, one to a horribly overrated LSU team, and one to a bad Mississippi State team) for Florida to FINALLY fall from the rankings. If it were up to me, the first official human polls would come out in the same week as the first official BCS poll. This would add to excitement and build-up as teams go through the first half of their season and would, once again, encourage teams to play some quality out-of-conference opponents in order to bolster their resume. I think that there is a good feel for which teams are good and which teams are not... I am convinced that LSU is only ranked as high as they are because of how overrated the SEC was before the season started.
  
• Now comes the issue that will be the most difficult issue to deal with... LOGISTICS. The problem with having a playoff is that not all teams travel well, and it is hard to get people to make last-minute travel plans to see their team play in a neutral-site playoff game. If you see the attendance at the ACC Championship game in Jacksonville every year, you'll know what I'm talking about. Having less than a week to decide to go to the game, purchase tickets, book travel/hotels, and make arrangements for the trip is not something that the average fan can do... and most fans would rather save up for the possible national championship game appearance if they're going to go through the hassle. Nobody wants to see the shiny new playoff games with a bunch of empty stadiums. This is why the "use the Rose Bowl/Orange Bowl/Fiesta Bowl/Cotton Bowl/etc. for the playoff games" idea wouldn't work. I'll apologize to all of the traditionalists that want to keep the Rose Bowl as a sacred event for the Pac-10 Champion and Big-10 Champion, but using that venue for the playoffs would not work... and even so, you'd have to change the dates. Another idea would be the basketball tourney model which would have a bunch of regional venues... unfortunately, if most of the teams come from one region, it wouldn't work. I honestly think the best thing would, once again, be the NFL model. Let's give home-field advantage to the higher seeds. I know that most fans at any game are coming from around the country, but I also know that you can fill a stadium with local populations of fans that are within driving distance to the stadiums... especially in a game of this magnitude. This would have the added benefit of the electricity of a home crowd in a do-or-die game! The national championship game could then rotate between the beloved Rose/Orange/Fiesta/Cotton/Sugar bowl venues. You could also have the rest of the bowl games continue to exist... similar to the NIT... they are basically exhibitions now... so nothing needs to change there.

Ok, I think I've posted most of the stuff that I considered on my commute to work this morning. The bottom line is that the ONLY thing that is stopping a completely AWESOME playoff experience in college football is BCS conference greed! It is an absolute myth that a playoff would diminish the importance of a regular season... especially if the number of teams in the playoff is sufficiently small and the selection process is sufficiently fair. It is a myth that it couldn't be done due to too many games... three extra games isn't terrible... and that's only for the situation in which a wildcard team pulls off a couple of upsets to get to the big game, and I would find it hard to believe that a team wouldn't be willing to play 2 extra games in order to assert that it is the UNDISPUTED best team in the land. If it is that big of a deal, reduce the regular season back to 11 games... The bottom line is this: The BCS SUCKS, and College Football deserves better!

I'm the Flying Leprechaun and I approve this message.