The college football season has wrapped up yet another exciting season, but as has been the case more times than not, it ended with some controversy. While Florida was defeating Oklahoma last Thursday to claim their second National Championship in three years, the Utah Utes, Texas Longhorns, and USC Trojans were watching at home wondering why not us. This is becoming a much more common scene for the college football world in the age of parity. So the question at hand is whether or not this can be fixed and, if so, how do we do it?

The current system does represent an improvement over its predecessor, the Bowl Alliance, and is vastly better than the old bowl system burdened by conference tie-ins, which prevented the top teams from playing each other almost without fail. Now that the Big Ten and Pac Ten have signed on for the Bowl Championship Series, college football fans are assured that the top two ranked teams in the country will face each other at the end of every year for the National Championship. That said, there is a problem with this system. Determining the top two teams is increasingly difficult with more than a handful of teams being able to make the claim for one of the top two spots. This year you could make the case that up to eight teams (Oklahoma, Florida, Texas, Alabama, USC, Penn St., Utah, and Texas Tech) deserved a chance at playing for the title. Boise St. was undefeated at the end of the regular season, but due to their strength of schedule their case would be too weak to consider.

So what is the solution to this problem? An eight-team playoff would be perfect and move any controversy away from who should be the top two teams to the more palatable argument over the 8th seed. The BCS formula would still be used to determine which eight teams make the playoffs, since that is the fairest way to compare so many teams. A tweaking of the margin of victory component would also help some, but there would need to be a limit on how much a winning margin helps a team should they win by 28 points or more. So the final playoff matchups this year would have ended up looking like this:

1. Oklahoma vs. 8. Penn St.
2. Florida vs. 7. Texas Tech
3. Texas vs. 6. Utah
4. Alabama vs. 5. USC

The cases made against having a playoff are usually centered on three issues: importance of the regular season, student-athletes having to play too many games, and forcing fans to travel too much to watch their teams play. Even with a playoff, the greatness of the college football regular season should remain intact. In the past, a team likely needed to go undefeated or lose only one game early in the season to have a chance at winning it all, but undefeated seasons will be few and far between going forward and when you lose your one game should not be the determining factor on whether or not you are worthy of a shot at the championship. This brings up the issue of polls as well, which should not be released until week 6, but that is probably an unrealistic goal. Under this playoff system, a team would be able to lose once and still have a good chance to make the postseason assuming their schedule was strong enough. This would also provide those smaller undefeated conference teams, like Utah this year or Boise State in 2006, a legitimate chance at the title by being able to prove themselves on the field. So the regular season still remains important.

In order to avoid teams playing upwards of an NFL-style 16 games in a season should they reach the title game (Oklahoma and Florida both played 14 this year), some overall schedule revision will need to be done and the playoff games would need to be scheduled around finals week if at all possible. Firstly, conference championship games will need to be done away with in order to make all conferences equal. This leaves you with the 12-game regular season (11 games would be ideal, but money issues will likely not allow that to happen) and then up to three postseason games for two teams. That puts you at 15 total, which is pretty high, but if you schedule the playoff games smartly, it is doable.

The final main issue is that of the ability of fans to travel to see their team play. If you had all playoff games played on neutral fields, then this could get tricky since that would be three different destinations over a five or six-week period of time. The vast majority of fans could not do this and therefore ticket sales could suffer. The solution to this would be to have the first round of games played at the higher seeds home field. The revenue could be given to the NCAA, which in turn could pay it back to the conferences that decided to forego the revenue of a conference title game. This also would place some more emphasis on the regular season since playing at home in college football is a major advantage. The lower-seeded team’s fans would have to travel up to three times still, but this is the best solution to the problem. It would also create a tremendous atmosphere for those first round matchups, whereas the bowl games now tend to be lacking in that area. So after the regular season schedule ends on Thanksgiving weekend, the playoff schedule this year would have looked something like this:

Friday December 12th - Utah at Texas – 8 pm Eastern
Saturday December 13th - Texas Tech at Florida – 12 pm Eastern
- USC at Alabama – 4 pm Eastern
- Penn St. at Oklahoma – 8 pm Eastern

Then you have two weeks off for finals and travel arrangements by fans to set up the following semifinal matchups to be played at neutral bowl sites that were predetermined before the year (assuming higher seeds won):

Saturday December 27th - Texas vs. Florida – 4 pm ET - Sugar Bowl
- Alabama vs. Oklahoma – 8 pm ET – Fiesta Bowl

During this whole schedule you would have the regular bowl schedule being played out. This also can be tweaked by eliminating conference tie-ins to all bowl games and have a Selection Sunday type show where the bigger bowls, starting with the one BCS level bowl left out of the playoffs for the year (Rose Bowl in this model), are able to select whatever two bowl-eligible teams they wish to take regardless of conference affiliation. This provides ample amounts of flexibility for the bowls and allows fans a chance to visit new locations from year to year rather than being stuck with another trip to San Antonio for example. Then after all the bowls have wrapped up, the title game can take place on the Monday after the first round of the NFL playoffs. This year it would have been (again, simply assuming the higher seeds):

Monday January 5th – Florida vs. Oklahoma – 8 pm ET – Orange Bowl

So in this case, this year’s BCS matchup would have happened after all, but the beauty of the playoff is that all of the top teams have a shot to win it all on the field. This should not only crown an undisputed champion, but some of the best matchups of the season will have taken place on the path to award the title. With this set up, all seven games are assured to have full stadiums and avoid a repeat of this year’s Orange Bowl, which had 5,000 unsold tickets and an additional 15,000 tickets simply go unused. Everyone would have something to play for in all of these games as well, so teams like Alabama would not come out flat and unprepared.

A playoff system would be the perfect way to finish up each college football season with an exciting sprint to the title and almost no controversy. Ratings for all of the games would be higher than most bowls are now, which will give the TV broadcaster of the games more bang for their buck. It is a winning idea for everyone involved!

(Agree or disagree with this idea? Comments welcome)