If you are a college football fan like me, you are always asking and debating whether or not to have a playoff. From the first college game in 1869 between Rutgers and what is now Princeton to LSU’s drubbing of Ohio State this past January, it’s hard to believe that this is the only sport format in North America that doesn’t have a playoff system to define it’s champion.
Call it tradition, call it elitist football programs trying to keep their money in-house to preserve the status quo, call it what you may, the aging bowl system has been around since 1902 with the first Rose Bowl and even with the implementation of the Bowl Championship Series in 1998, little has changed in the way college football has determined its champion. I remember when the BCS was instituted they stated that they would determine a clear #1 and #2 to have play in a true national championship game. I found it kind of odd that only six conferences were included in the BCS conferences though (ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, & Pac-10). They had put together two human polls and a computer ranking of the schools as well as taking into account strength of schedule and losses, intended to avoid a split national champion that occurred when Michigan was declared champion by the AP poll while Nebraska was declared champion by the Coaches poll in 1997. It was also intended to try take away the human bias of the polls to determine a champion without changing the bowl system currently in place.
The original configuration was pretty ingenious of the six “major” conferences…except for the fact that they kept “tweaking” the system, changing the way the rating system worked again after the AP declared a different national champion than the BCS in the controversial 2003 season where OU lost its only game so far that season in the Big 12 championship game but still remained at #2 to play one-loss #1 LSU while leaving one-loss #3 USC to play Michigan in the Rose Bowl. LSU won the BCS championship game while USC won against Michigan in the Rose Bowl which was good enough for the press to vote them national champions. Even with that sort of chaotic ending to a season, the 6 “major” conferences were still unwilling to take a look at instituting any sort of playoff, just changing the formula to have less emphasis on the computer rankings and strength of schedule and more on the human polls, the very thing that the original BCS was supposed to reduce. In the latest season with so many worthy two-loss teams that could have played one-loss Ohio State in the finale, like red-hot teams Georgia, USC, and Oklahoma or even the eventual champion LSU, there were many fans and press calling out for a change in the system. As a fan, I would have liked to see any one of those teams play for a chance at the title, especially my Sooners of course (I’d rather see them in the championship game than in another Fiesta Bowl if you ask me).
That change did not happen, as earlier this month the BCS conferences convened and decided not to take up a proposed “plus-one” format where two of the BCS bowls would act as a semi-final matchup where #1 vs. #4 and #2 vs. #3 would meet and then the winners of those two would meet in the BCS championship game. But what if they actually voted and approved of such a measure?
Surely, the “plus-one” format would only be a transition into a playoff system. What would be an ideal playoff system for the formally Division I-A college football? The Meat decided to take a look at that and see what a college football playoff would look like. With the help of my future brother-in-law Kevin, we took a look at what we think it would look like, trying to appease to both the hardcore college football fan as well as the heads of the BCS conferences.
We pretty much looked at what we could do to keep a lot of the same elements in the current bowl system alive as well as implementing the playoff. We figured 16 teams would be ideal for big-time college football. Anything bigger would be unimaginable and would take longer than the winter break these kids get from school. To keep the BCS system to appease the conference heads, we would use the existing BCS rankings to help determine which teams get in, that way no one can complain about a committee choosing who gets to play like in the March Madness of college basketball. Same rules apply to getting into the playoffs as getting into a BCS bowl: must win conference for automatic bid for the following conferences: ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, Pac-10. Notre Dame must finish in the top 12 to be eligible for the playoffs. At-large bids are given out to remaining teams from the BCS conferences finishing in the top 16. Any team belonging to a conference outside the BCS must finish in the top 16 to get an at-large bid into the playoffs. With the preservation of these rules, it would be hard for the BCS conferences not to take this up.
For fun, just to see who would have ended up on top, Kevin and I set up a bracket with the teams in the top 16 of the final 2007 BCS rankings and will play out those games on EA Sports NCAA Football 08. The next entry will outline the top 16 and the matchups as well as the results of that first round.
