Dr. Giganto

One of my biggest pet peeves in all sports is the BCS and the Bowl system for Division I-A college football. It makes no sense, considering all other team sports, professionally and collegiately, are decided using a tournament format. It makes even less sense when you take into account that Divisions I-AA, II, and III all havetournaments, but the highest level of college football does not.

Not only that, but it's simply not fair. It's not fair that these young men go out and bust their busts all year, just to have their champion decided by a computer. Also, if you're a team in a non-BCS conference, you have a 0% chance of winning the national championship. Zero. Zip. Nada. Zilch. You're an undefeated team from the MAC? Too bad. 12-0 in the WAC? You'd be better off being 0-12 in the ACC. It's ridiculous.

So, here is my proposal. A 10-game regular season (perhaps an 11-game season), consisting of 7 conference games (since the smallest conferences have only 8 teams) and 3 non-conference games (4 if you go with the 11 game schedule).

Then, a 16-team playoff. The 11 conference champions recieve automatic bids, and 5 at-large are selected. Also, if you still want to favor the "BCS" schools, you can automatically give the winners of these conferences seeds 1-6 in the tournament. What this does is it sets up a series of David vs. Goliath match-ups in the first round every year. The big, bad ACC champion versus the little team that could from the Sun Belt conference.

Plus, you can incorporate the Bowl games into the playoff structure. For instance right now there are 4 "BCS Bowls", with each rotating as the national championship game. You work the same system, except two of the other BCS Bowls are used for the Semifinal games. And, one BCS Bowl is reserved for a second-round game with the team of highest remaining seed.

Then, the teams that don't make the playoffs play in the lesser Bowl games, like the Independence Bowl, the Holiday Bowl, the Hawaii Bowl, and so on.


For instance, this is how it would have worked out using last year's results:

Tournament teams (listed according to seed):

1. USC: Pac-10 Champion
2. Texas: Big 12 Champion
3. Penn State: Big 10 Champion
4. Virginia Tech: ACC Champion
5. LSU: SEC Champion
6. West Virginia: Big East Champion
7. Notre Dame: At-large bid
8. Ohio State: At-large bid
9. Oregon: At-large bid
10. Auburn: At-large bid
11. Miami: At-large bid
12. TCU: Mountain West Champion
13. Central Florida: Conference USA Champions
14. Toledo: Mid-American Conference Champions
15. Nevada: WAC Champion
16. Arkansas St.: Sun Belt Conference Champion


Setting up these first round match-ups:

USC vs. Arkansas St
Texas vs. Nevada
Penn St. vs. Toldeo
Virginia Tech vs. Central Florida
LSU vs. TCU
West Virginia vs. Miami
Notre Dame vs. Auburn
Ohio St. vs. Oregon

You get 5 David/Goliath games, and 3 powerhouse vs. powerhouse games

Then, you have these potential second-round games:

USC vs. Ohio St
Texas vs. Notre Dame
Penn St. vs Miami
Virgina Tech vs. LSU

You mean to tell me the college football world wouldn't cream in their pants at the prospect of this??? It would be great for everybody involved.

Some people will say, "Well, that's too many games for these kids to be playing!" That's bull. Under the current system, the vast majority of teams play 11 or 12 games. Under my proposed system, exactly two teams every year will play 14 games, two teams will play 13 games, four teams will play 12 games, about half the teams will play 11 games, and the teams with losing records will play only 10 games (add one to each of those figures if you go with the 11 game schedule). Thus, the vast majority of teams will be playing exactly as many games as they played last year. Last year, 13 teams in Division I-A played 13 games. Under this sytem, only 2 or 4 will play more than that.

Not to mention the fact that last year, Northern Iowa and Appalachian St. of Division I-AA played 15 games, while two other I-AA teams played 14 games. So, if Division I-AA teams can do it, why can't the big boys?

My proposed system would be so much better than the current system, it's ridiculous. In fact, it makes so much sense, there's no way the NCAA would ever go through with something like this.

Alas...