This is something I wrote last year leading up to the BCS (when I was traveling a lot for work and my flights tended to always be delayed). I know it's long, so I aplogize...but this is my crack at a solution
I've never liked the idea of a playoff in college football. Any time the subject is brought up, I just have the fear that some 9-3 team finishing third in its conference would get hot during the month of December and win three or four games in a row against teams that had been consistently better all year and be your National Champion…with three losses. Some people would welcome this change, but to me, the beauty of college football has been just how much every game counts. You can't sleepwalk through September if you want to be relevant in January.
Lately, I've had a change of heart. I can't handle the boondoggle of the BCS, waiting on pins and needs on Sunday to see whether a computer gave Florida or Ohio State a better score. Also, I've heard some great points on how college football would OWN the month of December. If you think "March Madness" is fun, "December Delirium" would blow it out of the water. It would be unreal. Imagine the unbelievable matchups we'd have EVERY December. This year, in the system described below, we would have an eight team tournament between Ohio State, Florida, USC, Oklahoma, Louisville, Wake Forest (Yikes. O.K., assume that the ACC will usually supply us with Florida State, Miami, or Virginia Tech), Notre Dame, and Boise State. You don't think this would own the ratings for December? Can you imagine the Christmas parties watching this tournament?
If we're going to have a playoff in college football, to me this is how it should work. Ladies and Gentlemen, your Tournament of Champions:
• First, each of the 6 BCS conference MUST have a championship game. It doesn't make sense to have some teams playing championship games three weeks after another conference's last games. This probably means that the Big 10 picks up a team while the Pac 10 picks up 2 and the Big East picks up four to give each conference twelve teams. Fine. Let's take a moment to welcome San Jose State and Utah to the Pac 10, Boise State to the Big 10, and Marshall, Memphis, UCF, and MTSU to the Big East. Of course, this will give the Big East 427 teams for basketball, so a better solution might be to drop the 12 team requirement.
• The 6 BCS conference winners and 2 Wildcard teams NOT from BCS Conferences take part in an 8 team tournament. I think 8 is as big as we should go with this. If you can't finish in one of the top 8 spots, you really have no argument for having a chance to play in the Championship game anyway. Why can the wildcards not be from BCS conferences? If you don't win your own conference, there is no way you should have a chance to play for the National Championship. This was my biggest problem with an Ohio State/Michigan rematch. Do we really want a National Champion who finished second in its conference? Limiting the tournament to conference champions maintains the "every game matters" feel of the regular season. Yes, this means that we're going to have to let in Notre Dame just about any year they are 10-2 or better and we'll have to let in a Boise State or a TCU. But, on the bright side, this will leave the possibility of a Cinderella team, and at least it would be a team that probably won its conference or finished 12-0 or 11-1.
• The Championship game rotates between the Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and Fiesta Bowl (with apologies to our friends in Miami). The semifinal games are the other two of these three. The first round games take place in the Orange Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Gator Bowl, and Holiday Bowl (Apologies to Capital One and Outback, but they can't all be in Florida).
• The playoffs begin on the Saturday three weeks before New Years Day. In other words, we want the first two rounds on Saturdays and the Championship on New Year's Day where it belongs, allowing at least a week between the Saturday of the semifinals and the Championship. This means that the tournament starts usually two, sometimes three weeks after the conference championship games, which is better than Ohio State's two month break.
• Your "bowl-eligible" not making it into the Tournament of Champions (has a nice ring to it) are still playing in the other bowl games. These bowls are played on weeknights or on Saturdays before the tournament games. You could even keep some of them on New Years Day, as long as you play them before the Championship Game. The Peach Bowl, Liberty Bowl, Aloha Bowl, etc. aren't getting left out. In reality, their bowl games mean every bit as much in this system as they do now, which is basically nothing. In fact, these bowls have the chance to get some better teams because three previous non-BCS bowls are now being used in the playoffs. Everyone is a winner.
Unfortunately, we're probably a long way from seeing something like this. In reality, the BCS will "tweak" something next year in the computers to fix the problem that they had the year before, which will screw something up for next year, which they'll tweak again (putting us back to where we were three years ago) until the cycle starts over. Therefore, since nothing is changing, enjoy waiting on a computer to tell us which two teams will play in the Championship game on January 27th…
