One Man's Playoff Proposal

All they have to do is have an eight-team playoff the week after Conference Championship weekend.  Of the conferences that don't have a playoff, those champions with the highest rankings could have a "play-in" round during CC weekend.  They could be joined by the highest-ranked independent if the indie or one non-champion from a BCS conference.  

That would create a de facto 16-team playoff.  The round of eight could be the first week of December.  Then, two bowls are semis, and a "plus one' is played the same day as the "National Championship" game is played now.  

Everybody would still get to go to bowls, and there would be a true National Champion.  Eight teams would play one extra game after CC weekend, while two would play two extra games.  

It would be easy, everyone with a legitimate chance would get in, and it would take politics and voters out of the process for the most part, allowing the players to decide the championship. 

Also could you imagine a Jan 1 line up like this:

11am- Cotton Bowl

12pm- Fiesta Bowl

4pm- Orange Bowl

6pm- Rose Bowl

9pm- Sugar Bowl

Not really anything new here.  This is basically the "Plus 1" idea with an added BCS bowl to keep the number of teams the same.

The biggest problem with the Plus 1 is that it hurts bowls because fans are going to be disinclined to splurge on a trip to attend the game-before-the-game.  You need to have 2 weeks between games, at a minimum, just for logistical purposes.

If you want to meaningfully change the system while still emphasizing the value of the regular season, only conference champions should be permitted into the pool of championship contenders. 

i like this idea this is basically what i thought they should do all along. you just have to find a way for the #2 and #3 teams to play to eliminate the contraversy we had this year.

I think there is too much emphasis/weight given to the polls and preseason rankings.  A team ranked high preseason can lose a game, if to the right team, and not win their conference and still be invited to the NC.  By contrast, a team with a lower preseason ranking can only move up so many spots, even with help from teams ranked above them, and therefore have little to now shot at the title.  A playoff would at least give teams ranked outside the pre-season top 5 a chance to make a run.  It's fun for fans and the networks to talk about whose ranked where, but at the end of the day does anyone really know if the #1 team is better than the #10 team?

I think they need put the premium upon winning your conference championship and playing as difficult of a schedule as possible.  Make teams either win their conference championship or get an at large bid by impressing the hell out of the selection committee -- and NOT by beating FCS teams and directional schools. 

Although I think Alabama is a great team, and given a playof would expect them to have recevied an At Large Bid, if they had been ranked preseason #12 they wouldn't be in the NC this year.  I know that sounds obvious, but to me, it exemplifies the fact that it's not an open contest, it's a closed contest and I don't think it should be that way.

Play top teams early, win as many as you can, and then win your conference.  If you don't win your conference, at least go to the championship game and put on a good showing.  If not, well you had better have beat some top teams early and only lost your eventual conference champ.

Too much of a popularity contest and not enough of a football contest to me.  Everyone loves LSU and Bama, and they're very good, but how good?  We'll never know because they closed off the contest and told us that these two were by far the best so nobody else go a shot.

16 team playoff made up of all 11 FBS Conference Champions and 5 At Large Bids with every conference having a championship game.

I propose an eight-team playoff with autobids for the conference champions of the five major conferences (ACC, Big Ten, Big XII, Pac 12, SEC) with one caveat.  The conference champion must be in the top 14 of the rating system utilzed to seed the teams (this is the same criteria used for appearing in a BCS bowl).

The field is rounded out by the three highest ranking non-conference championship teams.  If a conference is unable to provide a top 14 champion, then it loses its autobid and an additional at large team is added.  Using the BCS system as the rating, that means ACC champion Clemson would not be in the playoff.

The eight teams that would get into the playoff for this past season would have been as follows per their BCS rankings:

1.  LSU (13-0, SEC Champion)

2. Alabama (11-1, SEC At Large)

3. Oklahoma State (11-1, Big XII Champion)

4. Stanford (11-1, Pac 12 At Large)

5. Oregon (11-2, Pac 12 Champion)

6. Arkansas (10-2, SEC At Large)

7. Boise State (11-1, MWC At Large)

8. Wisconsin (11-2, Big Ten Champion) 

The quarter- and semi-final games would take place at the home stadium of the higher rated team (thus making sure the regular season counts) and be played on the third and fourth Saturdays of December.  The final game would be at a neutral site on the second Saturday of January (or some other suitable date that will not conflict with NFL playoffs).  The major bowl games will take place on their current dates, i.e., between the semi-final and final game of the championship.

The top 4 conference champions will be seeded 1-4.  This transfers the success of the regular season into the post season (thus making sure the regular season counts) and awards conference champions with home field advantage.  It also means that teams which do not win their divisons or conferences do not get the benefit of not participating in a conference champion game (with the exception of the Big XII).  The first round of games would have been as follows:

#8 Boise State (11-1, MWC At Large) at #1 LSU (13-0, SEC Champion)

#5 Alabama (11-1, SEC At Large) at #4 Wisconsin (11-2, Big Ten Champion)

#7 Arkansas (10-2, SEC At Large) at #2 Oklahoma State (11-1, Big XII Champion)

#6 Stanford (11-1, Pac 12 At Large) at #3 Oregon (11-2, Pac 12 Champion)

This system ensures that the major bowl games still have the opportunity to put together attractive matchups to ensure television ratings, ticket sales and tourists to their locales.  With the setup above, the Orange (Clemson and West Virginia) and the Sugar (Michigan and Virginia Tech) could have kept their same matchups.  The Rose and the Fiesta Bowls could have picked from a pool of teams including Michigan State, Kansas State, South Carolina, Georgia, and Baylor.  Also note that if USC had participated in the Pac 12 championship game and was able to participate in the post-season, the loser of the P12CCG (either Oregon or USC) would have been added to the pool.  Theoretically, that means the Rose Bowl could have been MSU v. Oregon or USC and the Fiesta Bowl might have matched up Kansas State with South Carolina or Georgia.  The Cotton Bowl (which is angling for a major upgrade in the bowl hierarchy) could have had Baylor and SoCarolina or UGA.

Besides being a reward for a successful regular season and conference championship, having the quarter- and semi-final games insures that they're played in collegiate settings in front of a packed crowd.  I can't imagine that the games listed above played in Baton Rouge, LA; Madison, WI; Stillwater, OK and Eugene, OR would be absolute sell outs. 

Due to conference realignment, I dropped the Big East from any consideration for its champion getting an autobid.  Any team from outside the five major conferences (who will soon be comprised of 62 teams)--including independents like Notre Dame and Brigham Young--will compete for one of the at large bids in order to get into the playoff.

I think this system is essentially sound.  The big question will be which rating system to use and if the rating system I proposed above awarding conference championships is utilized to seed teams or not.  The alternative would be to seed the teams solely based on the rating system utilized, but that would open up the possibility of teams that didn't win their divisions getting seeded higher than conference champions who had to play one more game to get into the playoff.

You can also look at the qualifier for conference champsions to be in the top 14 and modify it, if desired.  If you only want teams in the top 12 to participate in the playoff, then go that route.  If you want to loosen up the standard, then make it top 16.  If it's the latter, then Clemson would have bumped Boise State in the playoff and been made the #8 seed.

whenever I see the argument of rather a team deserves to be in a tourney if they luckily win the conference championship or win a weak conference. If a team gets in because in and they aren't that good they will lose. That's the point of a tournament. But if they do what need to do to get in they have earned the chance to compete. If UCLA makes the Pac-12 championship game and manages to beat Oregon. Good for them. Your reward in the first round is playing LSU at LSU. If they keep winning nobody can argue against them. If the Big East or ACC sucks the champ is rewarded by having to play a better opposition then they've seen all year. If they lose in the first round no one cares. If they win and keep winning maybe the conference was better than we thought.

It's a stupid argument and it needs to die. That is the point of a tournament with an unbiased field.

You can pretty much rename this "Two Men's Playoff Proposal" because this is basically my system to a T.

Your proposal is pretty close to something I could imagine them implementing. It’s a fairly modest tweak to the existing system, rather than a radical re-imagining of it.

But claims about “preserving the sanctity of the regular season” are all hooey. The fact is, a playoff increases the importance of the regular season, because it increases the number of teams that have something to play for.

I mean, look at NCAA basketball. Has anyone suggested that its regular season is meaningless? Going into the final couple of weeks of the season, there are probably 100 teams with a realistic chance of qualifying for the tourney. If basketball worked the way football does, probably 90–95 percent of those teams would know that, no matter what they did, their remaining games would just be meaningless exhibitions, for nothing more than pride.

The commissioners won’t install a full-blown playoff for FBS football. But in the most likely scenario, a “plus one,” the regular season will become more important for more teams, simply because more of them will be in games whose outcome could qualify them for championship contention.

Nor does a playoff (even a four-team “plus-one” playoff) render the out-of-conference games meaningless. It does that only if conference champions are auto-seeded into the games. I doubt that they would go that route. If you have a selection committee or other selection mechanism that considers strength of schedule, teams that schedule OOC patsies would suffer the consequences.

You are totally incorrect that the current system “usually (but controversially)” determines a fair and correct champion. The whole controversy (which occurrs more often than not) is that the system is so frequently arbitrary and unfair.

Finally, you can’t really count on a fair outcome unless the bowl games are seeded. In your proposed slate, if LSU, Oklahoma State, and Alabama had all won their games, you’d still be stuck with the same problem: three credible candidates for a championship game in which only two can play. No, you need Oklahoma State and Alabama to play each other in a bowl, with LSU playing the #4 team.

........but would have been a travesty for one team is 2005. USC and Texas were the preseason #1 and 2 teams. They remained that way all year long, and in the end were the only two unbeatens left. People point to it as a year the BCS "got it right", however, it could have turned out quite differently had PSU beat us in AA. PSU wasn't ranked at the beginning of the year and didn't get ranked until after the 6th week of the season.

They ended up beating Ohio by a score of 17-10, at PSU, while Texas beat Ohio 27-24, at Ohio. Essentially, those two games were a push, considering the common opponent. PSU had one other close game all year, other than Ohio and UM, when they played NW. Other than that, the rest were decisive wins, or blowouts.

Does anyone think PSU would even have been considered for inclusion in the MNC game over Texas or USC(assuming they beat UM that year)? I don't, even though they had as decent a schedule strength as Texas did, and including a similar win over Ohio as Texas did. As it was, PSU lost one game all year, an away game, on a last second pass(and a sweet pass and catch it was, too), and it cost them. If Henne doesn't make that pass and MM doesn't catch it, PSU could have found itself unbeaten, against a fairly tough schedule, but on the outside looking in. 

I like the idea of the top six teams playing a play-off.  #1 and #2 get byes, no auto qualifiers, doesn't matter if you win your conference championship or if there's multiple teams from a single conference.

You still need to have a good season, probably less than 2 losses to get into it.  Obvious problems with teams getting left out.  In my way the bowl games get played separate, they aren't part of the play-off and get selected the same way they've always been selected, the only difference is the top 6 teams aren't in them.  Total pipe dream, I know.

One of the real problems in my mind is the selection system.  The pollsters.  We've all read these articles about how seriously AP voters take their jobs, or don't, and obviously coaches can't watch all the teams when they're busy coaching on the sidelines.  The ranking system is completely fucked up. 

I think preseason rankings should be gotten rid of, the first top 25 poll should come out about midseason, after everybody's played some games.  The preseason rankings end up affecting the pollsters opinions too much, which I don't think is right because college teams really do change a lot from year to year.  Preseason rankings are largely based on last season's performance, when it could be a completely new team out there.

It doesn't really make sense to have a ranking system that's constantly changing, especially when the system isn't based on teams' performance, but on what a group of people think about the teams' performance.