Important: A Fix for the Bowl Season Ennui - a bold reform proposal
A fix to the Bowl Season ennui
Is Henri the Otter your spirit animal? If so, it’s probably because the College Football season ends with a lame conference championship weekend, an odd month-long pause in games, then a bowl season that unifies everyone in their hatred of it all. I have an important proposal to fix this.
Background. The entire college football system is geared towards figuring out who the number one team is each season. While that is good and fine, it comes at the expense of what could otherwise be an exciting climax to the season. Beyond just finding the best team, which is the subject of so much debate, we also argue about which conference is best. That is one of the most intense conversations, I think in part because it includes regional pride, and every team’s fans like to think that their team played in the toughest neighborhood. But the argument over which conference is the best is largely academic because teams from rival conferences rarely meet on the field. Think about how ridiculous that is: rival conferences avoid playing each other. Instead, teams line up cupcakes and mostly boring intraconference schedules. So when it comes to the fans, we are left with arguing which team *would* beat which team *if* they were to play. In SEC country, where I live, college football fans insist that they are the best. Big Ten fans argue that SEC is overrated and top-heavy. But it’s all just argument. Wouldn’t you rather see teams actually play then just hurl insults on Twitter at each other? I’ve got a solution to this, and it doubles as a way to convert the boring conference championship weekend into something that would have the entire fan population glued to their TVs.
And as you know, the final “Conference Championship” week of the season is awful. Although the sport only has about 11 games per season, the Powers That Be have decided that around 90% of teams should not play on the final week of the season. And of those ~10% of teams that do play (in their respective Conference Championship games), some of those are rematches of games played earlier in the year. Most fans’ teams stay at home. And for those that do play, the games are often in some place too long of a drive and lame (ahem, Indianapolis). In most cases involving the top conferences, the only question is whether a top team will stumble, effectively punishing their conference for playing the game by setting up their best team to be knocked out of the playoff.
It is absurd to me that we keep 90% of CFB players from playing in the final week of the season. It is a missed opportunity to do something way better. Something exciting, that will grip college football fans all over the nation.
Solution. I’m talking about Conference Pride Weekend.
Here’s what I envision, along with an example based on recent years. We must replace the Conference Championship weekend with Conference Pride weekend. Let’s show the SEC once and for all that we are a superior people (except for Alabama; just bein’ real).
Here’s how it works. Take your entire conference’s standings, top to bottom. Then match up their game against the equivalent team in a rival conference. Then, on one single weekend in early December, have the two conferences go at it: Big Ten vs SEC. The conferences could rotate, so that the next year the Big Ten would take on, for example the Big 12, or the Pac 12. Instead of having only 14% of teams playing, we should have ~100% of teams playing. This puts everyone in the mix. And as a matter of conference pride we would all be invested in seeing even lowly Big Ten teams hold up against their SEC matchup. Frankly, it would be a huge money-maker for both TV and in-person attendance.
Think how much more exciting this would be. Rather than have a single OSU vs Northwestern Big Ten final, generating interest in just two of the fourteen Big Ten fanbases, a “Conference Bragging Rights” weekend would fold all fourteen fanbases into the mix, and would generate interest among fans to watch other games of their conference foes.
I use the Big Ten /SEC scenario here because I think that is the best matchup, but it could be a long-form round-robin arrangement, such as the Big Ten playing the SEC one year, then the Pac 12 the next year, then the Big 12 the next year, or something along those lines.
Here’s how it would play out.
The 2018 Season Scenario in a Big Ten vs SEC matchup:
1 Ohio State vs Alabama (in Tuscaloosa)
2 Michigan vs Georgia (in Ann Arbor)
3 Northwestern vs LSU (in Baton Rouge)
4 Penn State vs Florida (in Happy Valley)
5 Iowa vs Kentucky (in Lexington)
6 Wisconsin vs. Texas A&M (in Madison)
7 Michigan State vs Mississippi State (in Starkville)
8 Purdue vs Missouri (in West Lafayette)
9 Minnesota vs South Carolina (in Columbia)
10 Maryland vs Vanderbilt (in College Park)
11 Nebraska vs Auburn (in Auburn)
12 Indiana vs Tennessee (in Bloomington)
13 Illinois vs Arkansas (in Fayetteville)
(Rutger stay home)
The 2018 Season Scenario in a Big Ten vs Pac 12 matchup:
1 Ohio State vs Washington State (in Pullman)
2 Michigan vs Washington (in the Big House)
3 Northwestern vs Stanford (in Stanford)
4 Penn State vs Utah (in Happy Valley)
5 Iowa vs Oregon (in Eugene)
6 Wisconsin vs Arizona State (in Madison)
7 Michigan State vs California (in Berkeley)
8 Purdue vs Arizona (in West Lafayette)
9 Minnesota vs USC (in the Rose Bowl)
10 Maryland vs UCLA (in College Park)
11 Nebraska vs Colorado (in Boulder)
12 Indiana vs Oregon State (in Bloomington)
(Rutger stay home)
How’s that for a slate of games? Wouldn’t you hole up and watch everything?
Let’s face it, the existing Conference Championship weekend is pretty boring, and is just a prequel to a boring bowl season. It shouldn’t be that way.
Since I know by publishing this on MGoBlog I’m opening my proposed system up for critiques, I’ll get a few of them out in the open first. And the rest of you can eat a bowl of bucknuts.
- Problem #1: “But there isn’t enough time for the colleges and fans to plan because the standings wouldn’t be set in stone until the week before Conference Pride weekend!”
- Wrong. Yes, there is. Under the existing system, the conference championship teams already have only one week to prepare for their foe and make all their travel plans. If it isn’t a deal-breaker now for conference championship games, then it shouldn’t be for the other teams. That said, if a school can’t make its stadium available, the conference could hold that game in, say, the Georgia Dome or Indy’s Lucas Oil Stadium. Or, the standings could be “set” for purposes of College Rivalry Weekend a week or two before if it really is a big problem. Or the games could be set for two weeks after the end of the season to get an extra week in.
- Problem #2: But this doesn’t answer who is the best college football team!
- First, so what? I’m amazed at how many people think that the sole purpose of any college football season is to determine what single team is the best. Most teams play their season knowing full well that they don’t have a chance at making the playoffs. Yet people pack their stadiums anyway. Second, it actually does help us identify the best teams because if one conference dominates another, we know that the elite of the relatively tough conference has a better argument for playoff consideration than a team from a less-tough conference.
- Problem #3: But it’s too cold for southern teams to play up north at that time of year!
- Too bad. Besides, I think most SEC teams and their fans would like the idea of playing at the Big House. Just like many of our fans would like to check out Oxford, Mississippi’s interesting tailgating tradition, or play in the Swamp, or combine a trip to LSU with a weekend in New Orleans. And ask any SEC team if it’s too cold for them and they will call BS.
- Problem #4: The powerful suits at the NCAA, conference offices, and bowl committees would never let this happen.
- This to me is the most interesting problem. How is it that college football is so great, and which has been consistently great for over a hundred years, can be so poorly managed? I don’t really know. There are a lot of fixes to the bowl season. I don’t think fans are unified in their demands, and that if we could settle on some sort of list of reforms and then just dominate the conversation pushing those reforms, we could probably make some headway. We don’t really know much about the people and committees/entities running the show, and if we were to shed some light and start pressuring them, we could see the sorts of reforms that would do the sport well. This goes for compensating athletes we cheer to improve their well-being for the time after they leave the spotlight. But in any event, my proposal here is mostly theoretical, so I’m assuming an NCAA is progressive minded to implement something as wonderful and exciting as this (which tests the limits of my ability to assume).
I want to address some benefits too:
- Benefit #1: A Conference Pride Championship answers the question “which conference is the toughest.”
- When you line up one conference for a big fight against another conference, it makes the traditionally academic argument about which conference is the toughest a bonafide “let’s settle this on the field” matchup.
- Benefit #2: General parity means that these matchups would be hard fought and exciting.
- We all hate the way SEC teams line up FCS teams late in the season for boring blow-outs. I hate blow-outs, even when my team is on the winning side. With this system, teams that are generally close in their respective standings means they will be generally equal in strength, unless of course, one conference is tougher than the other, which is what this system is great at finding out.
- Benefit #3: More money for everyone.
- First, by playing 13 games instead of 1 game, the conferences and the schools make more money. By making these games home-and-home, it would generate more money for the cities hosting the games. And TV rights and attendance fees ought to be sizable. More schools get more money. The conference gets more money. University towns get more money. And all to the benefit of fans, who get a great weekend of football.
- Benefit #4: More playing time since there is near full-participation of teams means more time for players to excel against strong opponents.
- In the average college game there are about 72 offensive snaps to go around a team of 85 players. That’s not a lot. Many of these players are trying to get noticed by scouts. Give these players more chances to make an impression and position themselves for the NFL.
- Benefit #5: Gives college football fans the chance to host a game against a non-traditional powerhouse, or see their team in an away game at a college campus.
- In the scenario above, Michigan gets a shot at Georgia in the Big House. How exciting would that be, both for us and for Georgia fans, who get to see a game in the nation’s world’s best stadium. And OSU fans travel to the den of the best team in the country with a fighting chance to knock them off their pedestal on the best team’s home turf. As mentioned above, it also gives fans a chance to see interesting college football traditions that they would otherwise never see, like Ole Miss’s great tailgating atmosphere.
- Benefit #6: It removes the lameness of the Conference Championship games.
- Some conference championship games are simply repeats of games already taken place earlier in the season. And the more casual fan of college football’s non-elite teams don’t even bother to watch because they have no dog in the fight.
- Benefit #7: There is a broader benefit to college football.
- I’m not the only one who laments the powers-that-be and how they seem to make all the worst decisions, watering down the fan experience. Whether it is the addition of bad teams to conferences which makes for bad games (like Rutgers), to having an unnecessarily narrow playoff that leaves out many good teams, to incentivizing teams and conferences to play tomato cans to best position themselves for the playoff. How many times do you look at a weekend’s schedule of games and wonder why there are only one or two Top-25 matchups? And the demise of the bowl season, with players holding themselves out and treating the games as meaningless practice sessions is a symptom of the overall problem. It is ennui squared, sir! Where is the excitement? It is waning. That’s why a Conference Rivalry weekend, with a long lineup of big games, would bring a jolt of excitement to an otherwise boring final weekend. And it plays into our country’s natural geographical rivalries, north vs south, east coast vs west coast, etc. I’m not the only fan who resides in a foreign conference (SEC) and wishes my conference (Big Ten) could just collectively square up with the SEC and shut them up. It has all the ingredients to be a real killer in TV ratings.
- Benefit #8: Just look at that slate of games! How much fun would that be to settle in for that day of football watching?
Here’s what the system would have looked like for the 2017 Season Scenario, in a Big Ten vs SEC matchup:
1 Wisconsin vs Alabama (in Tuscaloosa)
2 Ohio State vs Georgia (in Columbus)
3 Penn State vs Auburn (in Auburn)
4 Michigan State vs LSU (in East Lansing)
5 Northwestern vs South Carolina (in South Carolina)
6 Michigan vs Missouri (at the Big House)
7 Purdue vs Mississippi State (in Starkville)
8 Iowa vs Kentucky (in Iowa)
9 Nebraska vs Texas A&M (in College Station)
10 Rutger vs Mississippi (in Rutger)
11 Indiana vs Florida (in Gainesville)
12 Minnesota vs Arkansas (in Minneapolis)
13 Maryland vs Tennessee (in Knoxville)
(Illinois stays home)
Now I know what you’re thinking. We all have opinions on how to change things. Rather than chiming in here on separate reform measures (expanding the playoffs, paying players, etc.), tell me what you think about this plan. Frankly, I think it would be the most exciting weekend in college football (not including Michigan/Ohio State weekend).
GO BLUE!
August 18th, 2019 at 11:31 PM ^
I was prepared to hate this but I have to say, it’s pretty creative.
The bowl system as it currently exists is outdated and really boring. The bowls have been rendered meaningless by the playoff system.
Your proposal would accomplish the original purpose of the bowls - matching up teams across conferences - and would make for a great week of football. So many meaningful games that could really impact the playoff picture.
The only flaw that I see is that people still want conference champions. That said, we had conference championships for years in the Big Ten without a conference championship game, so I don't think that his is a big deal.
Nice work.
August 19th, 2019 at 12:07 AM ^
Thanks MichGoBlue. I like getting a conference champion too, but maybe I’m just stuck in the old system. I don’t like having two divisions, and the championship game always seems to be about whether one team can block the other from the playoff. It’s lame that we are stuck playing Rutger and Maryland while traditional foes like Wisconsin disappear for years. But the thing that bothers me most is that only two teams of the conference play that weekend. I’d rather see the whole conference challenge a PAC 12, SEC, Big 12, or ACC.
August 20th, 2019 at 3:18 PM ^
Was prepared to hate it. Hated it.
Conference vs conference makes sense early in the season. Matching the best from each conference against each other makes sense in the post-season. Mixing the two is absurd. At a time in the season where everyone is eyeballing a national championship, nobody is going to care about sec #4 vs big ten #4.
I mean, if they do care, that's basically what the current bowl system does. All this is doing is turning big ten #x vs sec #x and big ten #y vs acc #y into all big ten vs sec. Or, in many years, all big ten vs big 12 or big ten vs acc. Who cares?
I've already posted the solution to mediocre conference championships. Get rid of divisions. Always have the best two conference teams play in the ccg. Like the big 12.
Force the playoff committee to choose four of the five champs from those games. Screw the smaller conferences. $%#@ notre dame.
This gives us an incredible amount of hype around those cc gamed and effectively expands the playoff from 4 to 10 teams . Yes, one cc gets screwed each year - but it also gives each ccg victor an 80% chance of making the playoff and keeps the damn committee from considering the sec ccg loser, or (even worse) the non-divisional champion who happens to have one loss and sat out the ccg.
As an added bonus, this encourages awesome non-conference matchups because it really doesn't matter much if oklahoma loses to alabama in week two as long as they take care of business in-conference.
Side note: if we had four major conferences instead of five, I'm pretty sure this would already be the format.
Extra side benefit: players at Michigan would be guaranteed to play every other big ten team at least twice during their four years. None of this nonsense where we don't play a big ten west team for almost a decade.
Cheers.
August 21st, 2019 at 2:14 PM ^
You'd need to have all conferences with 10 teams to make this work fairly. Otherwise schedules would be too different between teams to really know who the top 2 are. That said, I agree with your solution.
August 18th, 2019 at 11:55 PM ^
This is good.
Re “problem #3”: It is NEVER too cold to play football. Big Ten teams play their bowl games in Pac 12 and SEC country every year. Make some of those southern players and fans play in the frost as God intended.
August 19th, 2019 at 12:09 AM ^
I agree. And I think the “southern teams don’t want to play in the cold” is a myth. Tell Auburn they could play in the Big House in December and I’ll bet the players and fans would love to make the road trip.
August 19th, 2019 at 12:28 PM ^
I'm not sure their fans would love to make the road trip. Two of my best friends live in Tennessee and Georgia, respectively, and they complain like crazy any time the weather drops below 40 degrees.
That said, screw them. This system would be worth it even if you only went to your team's home games, and the chance to host a meaningful out-of-conference game in December every other year, on average, would be awesome.
August 19th, 2019 at 1:28 PM ^
I bet your Tennessee and Georgia friends wore pledge pins on their ROTC uniforms...
August 19th, 2019 at 9:41 PM ^
when i played out west the team as a whole had a problem when it was wet and cold. myself and another guy on the team who was also from michigan and had played at iowa shamed our teammates with, shall we say, less than charitable words. all in good fun, but they were spoiled by the good weather.
August 23rd, 2019 at 1:59 PM ^
Their fans wouldn't bother making the trip. Everyone in the south thinks temps below 50 are too cold for human habitation. This is no exaggeration. They all think Michigan in December is a cold, gray, lifeless place where people sit around all day and either contemplate suicide or endlessly dig out of snow. This is only a slight exaggeration. And honestly, I doubt the players would rather go to Ann Arbor than Miami or New Orleans.
August 18th, 2019 at 11:59 PM ^
Conference championships are actually pretty important. But why not both? Have it replace the "November bye week" that the SEC likes to take, and reduce other B1G non-cons by 1. I don't care about the other P5 cons. Just want the SEC.
August 19th, 2019 at 12:15 AM ^
Being a long-time resident of SEC country, I would love to see the Big Ten take on the SEC. it would be the football equivalent of the Big Ten-ACC challenge in college basketball. But a Big Ten-SEC football challenge would be way more interesting. Twelve games spread out on an early December Saturday, four games in each of the three time slots. What Big Ten team fan would not watch?
August 19th, 2019 at 6:58 AM ^
I like this idea of systematic inter-conference matchups, but I think it's much more plausible without changing the current structure of the postseason. The Big Ten-ACC challenge takes place within the confines of the normal basketball schedule, and I think something similar would be possible within the confines of the normal football schedule. You'll never get the SEC to drop their cupcake OOC schedule to start with them, but if there were even a Big Ten-Big 12 challenge in football, that would increase pressure on the other conferences to match it. It would also give those conferences an argument when it comes time to spread 4 playoff spots across 5 conferences. The first time the Pac whatever gets left out of the playoff because the Big 12 can point at its inter-conference challenge, they'll want to do it too. Once the SEC is the last conference standing, imagine them getting left out of a playoff for not having something similar. (Say that Clemson is clearly the nation's best team, but the ACC is clearly the worst conference, and got owned by the Big 12 that year. Then Clemson is in, but so is a Big 12 team. It's not that hard to imagine Pac whatever and Big 10 teams deserving the other two spots, and squeezing out the SEC.) Then everybody will want in.
August 19th, 2019 at 8:51 AM ^
It's a fascinating idea. This is something the Big Ten and SEC would have to organize on their own, like the Big Ten-ACC basketball games.
I would just do it like that based on the previous year's standings. That gives fans more time to travel*, makes it more likely the SEC or ACC schools will travel north, takes more games out of the hundred degree heat of August.
* Fans will fill Big Ten Championships ans playoffs at a moment's notice but not IU vs Arkansas. Also they are forced to pay premium prices when they book late.
August 19th, 2019 at 10:46 AM ^
Thanks Seth! I like your idea of basing it on the prior years' rankings so that fans and schools have time to plan ahead.
August 19th, 2019 at 2:10 PM ^
But to kind of piggyback off your original idea - the Big Ten home games can be early in the season, the southern conferences' home games can be late in the season (say December), and we can still do away with conference title games. Especially if the playoff expands, they're time consuming, bereft of tradition, and regularly fail at getting the best teams in the conference together.
I still like the idea of NYD bowl games, and while bowl week does feel silly I still watch the heck out of it even if it's mostly catatonic because half the teams dont care. But this would replace that with something better, for sure. I'm surprised by how much I like this idea.
August 19th, 2019 at 9:08 AM ^
All of the conferences don't have the same number of teams, so this system would disproportionately impact those teams at the bottom of a given conference, depending on who the other conference is. Not a huge problem if the rotation is fixed, but a problem nonetheless, because the teams losing out are the very teams that most need the help, recognition, etc.
Plus, you have the problem of not having an even number of conferences, so one conference gets left out each year.
Is there a way to make up a "temporary conference" of non-B5 teams that would exist just for that competition? Would it be worth doing, or would those teams be so inferior that the games would be meaningless?
I think you'd have to have the conferences pay the expenses for these games from the TV revenue, or schools like Vanderbilt or Rutgers could have a big financial burden on top of what they already have.
What I'd really like to see is this system replacing the bowls entirely, outside of the playoffs. You'd still have the championship games and playoffs, but the remaining games would be played a week after the conference championships, exactly as you suggest, but in the second week of December rather than in late December and January. Bowls as they are are ripoffs to benefit a bunch of suits. Players should be able to go home for the holidays. Maybe not doable with exams, though.
August 19th, 2019 at 11:10 AM ^
I like this idea, or some modification thereof.
I would add one other benefit. It would widen the pool of participants, as happens in some sports where overall team results are calculated to determine championships. It would expand the focus from the stars (who will be rewarded with a professional contract anyway), to include the wider body of student athletes who have toiled for many years with little recognition outside, perhaps, of their own team fanbase. Encouragement for those whose skills are less than elite is not a bad thing. Who knows what they may prove capable of if given a chance against comparable competition?
August 19th, 2019 at 12:03 PM ^
"Conference Pride Weekend" sounds dumb but an otherwise very cool idea.
August 20th, 2019 at 7:08 PM ^
Pride means something totally different these days.
August 20th, 2019 at 1:00 AM ^
I've always thought the solution is simple:
Conference Championship Week is boring - especially considering the half-filled NFL domes as you mentioned. Scrap it and replace it with the first round of an eight team playoff consisting of conference champions based on overall conference standings (the old fashioned way), and three at-large teams - the games take place at the higher seeded team's home. Way more exciting - especially when an SEC team has to go north on the first Saturday in December.
Rest of the season plays out as it currently does.
August 20th, 2019 at 8:55 AM ^
I like this idea a lot.
Couple of issues.
1. This fixes conf champ weekend and has nothing to do with the playoffs. You can still continue on with the playoff or more bowl games.
2. Title is lame.
August 20th, 2019 at 1:38 PM ^
I really appreciate the effort and time in this post.
Thank You.
August 20th, 2019 at 2:04 PM ^
Good job, Jacoby. An absolutely great idea with — darn it — absolutely no chance of success.
August 20th, 2019 at 3:32 PM ^
Your initial premise is flawed. The college football season isn't geared towards crowning the best team. Its to concentrate as much money as possible in the fewest hands.
August 20th, 2019 at 5:24 PM ^
The easier solution is to just expand the playoffs to 8 games. All the P5 conference winners than 3 of the best of the rest of the teams out there.
August 20th, 2019 at 7:03 PM ^
D-II and D-III have been running a playoff just fine for years. Use their model and simply make the lesser bowls the sites for some of the games and the major bowls for the final 4. It doesn't have to be rocket science.
August 21st, 2019 at 9:12 AM ^
This is sort of what was intended by the bowl system. I used to watch nearly every bowl on new years day and a few that spread in to the surrounding day or two. You won the national championship if you went undefeated and you scheduled tough teams so that you'd have SOS in the case of two 10-1 teams. The other bowl games gave validation to a teams undefeated record.
Now, no one gives a shit about the bowl games. They only care about the CFP. Money ruins things.
August 21st, 2019 at 2:24 PM ^
Maybe just do the regular season and ccg like they do now. then before the bowls start, all teams that didn't qualify will be matched up conf v conf. Those games will be played as home games (no bowl) over the next couple weeks. Then the bowl games start conf v conf, then cfp.
August 23rd, 2019 at 2:10 PM ^
This doesn't excite me very much.
Most fans of a team that just went 3-9 are just happy the season is over. They are NOT traveling to Starkville or Minneapolis during holiday season to watch their shit team play another shit team for "conference pride." The reason the bowl system has been successful over the years is that both teams get to play to be the champion of something, and the bowls take place when people are free from work and want to travel somewhere nice anyway. Nobody's taking time off in the middle of the holiday rush between Thanksgiving and Christmas to travel to a place where they don't even know where they're going until the week before. Indiana fans aren't even going to Bloomington for that game, let alone pissed-off Tennessee fans or either one of the Oregon State fans in existence.
Honestly, I think conference championship weekend is fine. Really. People don't care that much about conference pride that they're all gonna plop in front of the TV to watch the two ninth-place teams play for it, let alone drag their ass out in the cold to extend a season they're just happy is over anyway.
August 24th, 2019 at 8:05 AM ^
The players headed for the nfl draft would probably sit out.
August 24th, 2019 at 2:16 PM ^
It's freaking brilliant. It really is. If the powers that be are die hard for the championship games, then sure, take the 2 contestants of the championship games out of the mix and use the remaining teams. Definitely switch it around though. 2 years Big 10/SEC, 2 years B10/B12, 2 years B10/Pac12, 2 years B10/ACC and I guess 2 years B10/MAC or SWAC or something. Need 6 conferences to make it work
August 27th, 2019 at 7:30 AM ^
Hey, this is awesome! But, some guy already did it better.
Outside of ^ that, I have several other issues/comments on this.
1. Speak for yourself on conference championship weekend being "awful". While we only get 10ish FBS games that weekend, it allows more focus on each game, instead of being swallowed up in the Saturday flood like the regular season Saturdays. Plus, each game is the best each conference has to offer. Is every game a classic? No, but you're guaranteed at least some pretty good football, and in virtually all seasons, there is meaning and implications to multiple conference title games.
2. It's super cute that you think Indiana-Vanderbilt on the first Saturday of December will bring fans out and have them "glued to their tvs". You're telling me that if this was around in 2013/2014, you would be seriously interested in watching Michigan take on Kentucky/Vanderbilt/Arkansas in December, AFTER The Game? Give me a break. Rivalry weekend serves as borderline bowl teams' regular season climax as it is. Adding an extra game like that would devalue rivalry weekend and further devalue the regular season as a whole, IMO. This is also quite perilous for a team that happens to not be in the conference title game but still has a shot for a playoff bid (2016 Ohio State, 2017 Alabama). I don't agree with putting a non-conference/non-division champion in the playoff, but the committee has done it twice, so it looks like that door is perpetually open. Why would a 1-loss Ohio State, a 1-loss Michigan, a 1-loss LSU, etc., want to go play another game against a tough opponent that could give them a loss that would ruin any outside shot of them getting into the playoff? The last thing a 1-loss non-division champ would want would be to play an opponent of similar caliber, no matter where it is. It's one thing if it's in a conference title game, at least there is a conference trophy at stake.
3. See my post about doing basically this exact same thing, but just doing it in September, on the 2nd week of the season. That way, fans, coaches, players, stadium staffs, etc., have 9 months to prepare for a game AND the bemoaning of the quality of play being down in the first game, or having to play a comparable P5 opponent in the first game of the season would be lessened. You can still schedule Western Carolina in W1 if you want as a tune-up (apologies to the Catamounts!).
4. I know Big Ten people and midwestern fans love to talk about "playing in cold/harsh weather", but if we're going to go down that road, let's be real and also admit that B1G teams aren't exactly rushing to play teams in the Deep South in late August/early September when it's 95 degrees and 100+ in the sun (Michigan just canceled a game at Arkansas). Every team in the Deep South goes through August practice in the heat and humidity, so I laugh whenever I hear about the "tougher, rugged" Big Ten playing in cold and snowy conditions. If you look at what past and current players say, most actually prefer to play in colder weather instead of hotter weather. Good try, though.
5. Your Problem #1 shows you are just immune to reality. Sure, we don't know for sure who is in each conference title game until the week before. Sometimes it can be 2-3 weeks out, but sure, we don't know even in late October/early November. But those respective cities at least know that there will be A GAME taking place, and can allocate staff/resources to prepare for it ahead of time. With your scenario, everyone has to keep that week open "just in case" we have to play a 7-5 Minnesota team. It's also hilarious that you simply submit the solution in case College Campus A's stadium isn't available of, just play down the road in NFL Stadium X! As if those venues just sit empty, waiting for a contrived, end-of-season interconference P5 matchup with nothing else going on. Your aforementioned "Georgia Dome" (Mercedes-Benz Stadium, guy) and Lucas Oil Stadium would both be unavailable in that case. Again though, good effort.
6. Problem #2, okay, I'm one of those fans that watches college football for the stories outside of the national championship race. But this "solution" still doesn't solve who the best teams or conferences are, because we still have home-and-away scenarios. Neutral site games are the best barometer of a "fair" matchup, even though most fans hate them. Your theory that SEC fans want to come up to the midwest in early December is also rich. If that was the case, why aren't there more bowl games in the midwest? There are like, less than 5? Even the B1G bowl games are in the South. Good try again, but juuust a bit outside.
7. The only people that harp about Problem #3 are you guys. Get over yourselves about being "tougher" because of colder weather. Play down south in 95 degree heat and then we'll see where we're at.
8. About your Benefit #1, see my Point 6.
9. Benefit #3 is part of the reason why some people lament the current college football setup. Money. But you can't have your cake and eat it, too. Which do we want? "A great weekend of football". To each his own...
10. Benefit #4, players would sit out these just like they do the RedBox Bowl. They wouldn't look at it as a chance to play more, they would see it as another opportunity to get injured.
11. Benefit #5, see my Point 4, and the "nation's world's best stadium"? haha. Also, nobody is stopping you from going to an Ole Miss game. If you want to check out other teams' game day atmospheres and traditions, just, like, go to one of their games, man.
12. Benefit #6 again you are completely wrong here. I guess you haven't been watching the SEC title game ever, or even the B1G title games are good most years and have playoff/Rose Bowl implications. I'm not sure what you're looking for out of these games.
13. Benefit #7, you complain about the fan experience being "watered down", yet this is exactly what that would continue to do, a 13th game for everyone in which 90% of the teams involved will have no interest in playing. It's basically the bowl setup we have now, except a lot worse.
14. Benefit #8, you would be racing to your seat to watch Stanford/Minnesota, on the first Saturday of December? While Alabama and Georgia are having a titanic matchup in the SEC title game? You do you, man.
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