I don't think this a workable plan.  You say that teams losing in the first round would still be eligible for bowls, but that would be holding spaces for them as well.  Thus delaying  all the bowl announcements by another week.

Eventually, there's not enough time to plan flights, hotel rooms etc .  It's not a big deal if you are going to Florida or New Orleans, but I would think the lower tier bowls could be severly harmed by not knowing their matchups.

Brian, I disagree with you on one wee little point: A playoff will happen, and it will happen as soon as the pile o' money associated with a playoff is obviously larger than the pile o' money associated with the current farce of exhibitions and, in your apt term, eyeballing. That's not going to be next year, and it probably won't be in five, but it will be in our lifetimes and we those of us lucky enough to get to the mountaintop will pass into the Great Beyond comfortable in the knowledge that our outrage finally persuaded uni prez's and others in jackets left over from ABC's Wide World of Sports to accept a much large pile o' money. It won't be the reason we'd like a playoff to happen, but it will ge the job done. So keep posting your BCS outrage every year at this time.

College football is unique in that there is no playoff which stirs much controversey.  Controversey should be embraced as it is the human aspect of the game. 

#1 Take the two highest ranked conference champions and play them in the title game.  This ensures no Alabama-LSU or UM-OSU.  

#2 Final BCS rankings don't take into account the top 16 coaches rankings.  Saban can vote OSU 4th but it would be meaningless.  

#3 Autobids to remain, but have to be conditional.  No team should be allowed into a BCS game with more than 2 losses.  If a 9-3 team wins the Big East then they do not qualify.

#4 There is not much that you can do about .com bowl games.  If a sponsor wants to host a game and pay a conference a bunch of money than so be it.  It's pretty easy not to watch a 4-8 team play a 6-6 team.  TVs have a bunch of channels.

#5 There will always be shortcomings, and that is entirely ok.

College football has the system that it has because you have 120 teams in I-A and only 12 scheduled games a year.  You have huge disparities in schedule strength.  You can't use simple W-L record like you can in the pros.  The only alternative then is a computer formula or human judgement.  Turns out, the BCS uses both.  Complaints that the BCS is just a popularity contest fail to address the fact that a playoff would also be that.  But the margin for error would be higher, because you would have more teams.  But who those teams are and where they get seeded would still be essentially voted on.  The bigger you make a playoff, the less important that judgement becomes.  But that also means that you make the regular season less important too. 

The decline of the non-conference schedule is a big contributing factor to this controversy and confusion.  Teams used to play a lot more quality OOC opponents, and that gave you a better sample size for judging teams.  Michigan, for example. played Miami and Notre Dame in the same year once.  A couple of years later, we played FSU and ND.  Later, we played UCLA and Colorado in the same year.  When you've got more matchups like this, you get a better idea of where all the teams stand. 

Saban voting Okie State #4 hasn't received nearly the criticism it deserves. Add in that Gundy doesnt even have a vote. The coaches poll should be shot into space.

are listed here   

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/vault/HICFP_Individual_Rankings_Dec_4_…  

There were 3 voters that placed OK St. at 5th and 1 (Derrick Mayes - former nd wide receover) had OK St at 6 (someone better check his bank account for the recent deposit from Nick Saban).

Go Blue!

Go back to the old bowl system and then have the winners of the Rose, Orange, Fiesta and Suger have a final four playoff.  Would require only three extra games compared to the old system used for decades.

Eight teams would have a shot at the championship.  If you don't make the final 8, too bad.

Edit: the post above says the same thing, but with more detail. 

Kill the Big East and Big 12.  4 super conferences are left.  Round 1 of the playoff are the conference championship games.  Rounds 2 and 3 are basically the +1 system people want.  So we'd be looking at Wisconsin, LSU, Oregon, and Clemson.  I could live with that.  Sugar Bowl is ACC-SEC champ.  Rose Bowl is PAC12-Big12 champ.  NC site rotates between a couple locations.  

First off this keeps regular season play important.  First off you have to win your division, then you have to win the championship game.  In most cases the division is up for grabs until the last game or so in the season.  MSU for example couldn't rest easy until we beat Neb.  So they had a max of one week to mail it in.  In the other division it came down to the wire with Wisconsin vs PSU.  So most years, admittedly not all, teams would be able to mail it in for a week or two at the most.  I guess LSU would have had the longest time to mail it in after they beat Arkansas.  

Now one possible flaw is that OOC schedule is meaningless, because it is all about winning your conference.  However as conferences expand just get them to hold more conference games.  So you get fewer Michigan vs Alabama matchups, but you also get fewer Michigan vs Delaware State matchups.  More conference games means despite the larger conference you still everyone fairly often and you get games that matter.  

The big flaw of course is when 6-6 UCLA somehow punks Oregon.  Then, yeah, urgh.  However just accept it was the price you pay for keeping the rest of the season meaningful (Want to play in the Big Dance?  Make sure you show up to blow those 6-6 teams out!).  It won't happen that often and will be rapidly corrected when someone paves over the 6-6 team in the following round.  

The other bowls can live on of course.  I'll still pay good money to fly somewhere warm and see Michigan play some decent team when seasons like this year happen.  

Playoffs aren't happening and as the risk of concussions and the like becomes more and more an issue, people are going to dig in against a multiple round playoff.  So from a political standpoint co-opt the bowls and the conference championship games to create your first two rounds.  Then just sell people on one more game.  

Edit:  One other point is that with 4 super conferences, the threat of a 6-6 winning out  also drops.  OU and OSU would be in the PAC16 likely.  So the championship could have been OU-Oregon or OSU-Oregon.  Basically if we're at a mixture of 14 and 16 team conferences, then the odds of a 6-6 slipping into a conference championship game are low.  Even the "brutal" SEC managed to get a 12-0 vs 10-2 matchup at the end of the year.  

If the goal is to have a play off between the 6 (or as some proposed 8) top ranked teams in collegel football why the restriction of two teams per conference? It is probably unlikely that 3 of the top 6/8 would be from a single conference, but if that is how the rankings come out why drop the 3rd team? 

system is so frustrating that I almost wish (I said almost) that we did not even crown a national champion.....just play the games and say - gee that was fun, then go home.

Brian, please explain why a 6 team playoff is superior to an 8 team playoff? You imply that it is but never explain why.

To me, 8's a bit better because it at least lets you capture all the big conference champions (maybe with a conditional (no 3 loss teams) autobid) and still slot in a couple sexy non-champs (Stanford, Boise, Alabama).

I think you need some form of autobid, otherwise the conference championship games are just a chance to pick up an extra loss - punishing the big conferences that host championship games.

Plus it helps mitigate the complaints of the regular season not mattering and cases where there are lots of good teams in once conference - sure they'll beat up on each other, but the champion will get a chance to play for the national title.

You've got to keep autobids for the major conferences.  The lore of collge football was built in no small part on games being played in late November and early December as winner-take-all contests with huge stakes.  Nebraska vs. Oklahoma, Michigan vs OSU, Auburn vs. Alabama, the SEC championship game, and now the Big Ten championship game.  You've got to keep that mystique in place for the major conferences. 

The basic question is "What is the purpose of the postseason?"

Is it to get the best matchups for bowl games? Because that's what the current system tries to do. It doesn't do it terribly well, but that's the goal -- to produce good games that fans will want to watch.

If, however, the purpose of the postseason is to crown a true national champion (as opposed to just matching up the best teams), you'd need to organize the sport into a set number of conferences and only allow conference champions into a playoff. That would always produce an undisputed champion, but it would not always produce the best games.

Don Strock has Michigan at 25! Wonder Twin powers activate.

I've always thought that this would be a great way to do things:

1) Six conferences get an automatic bid. Big 10, Big 12, Pac 12, SEC, ACC, Big East. Could be 8 if you want to add Conference USA and MWC. I don't.

2) Play an 8 game regular season and have a conference championship. 

3) 16 team tournament; Conference champs + the next 10 (or 8) highest rated teams.  Conference Champs +2 get home field advantage. Could also be a 12 team tourney with a bye for the top 4 ranked teams. 

Of course, there are a few huge problems. like, what about the teams who lose in the tounament? What about the teams who don't make it? I think, though, there would be a real advantage to this, as there could be a "tier" system where teams at the end of conference play are divided up into 16 team sections, where they play a tournament among themselves. In the lower tier systems, every team would be garunteed 1 home game, as with the loosers of the "Winners" braket. 

This is the ultimate pipe dream and really (and probably too) convoluted. It would be fun though. 

This is very similar to what I want to see.  The only thing missing is a plan for how to rank/select teams.

I think we need a committee.  It's completely ridiculous to use the coaches poll.  Coaches have all kinds of interests in the outcomes, all kinds of biases about other coaches/programs, virtually no time to follow the rest of college football, and a tendency to hand their ballots to God knows whom.  The Harris poll is a little better, but barely, since there's no accountability, the criteria for getting a ballot seem pretty silly, and I'm sure there are regional biases.  Meanwhile, the computer rankings have proven themselves very questionable this year, as many of them rely on an algorithm that puts far too much weight on a few games that a conference's teams play at the beginning of the year.

I think the best option available is an NCAA basketball-style selection committee of experts that spends a lot of time looking at this and then has to answer for its decisions.  Sure, there will be debates afterward, but that's inevitable no matter how you do it.

I would suggest that the 1 and 2 seeds need to be the highest rated conference champions, not just the highest rated teams. Alabama needs to have penatly for not winning their conference. The only time that become an issue is when you have 5 or more teams in the top 6 that didn't win their conference championship. How often do you think that might happen? 

Come on! This is the sport that marks the spot by eyeballing it, then brings out the chains to measure the eyeball.
<br>
<br>It deserves choosing a champion by subjectively choosing then objectively verifying.
<br>

The BCS's problems can be fixed in 3 steps, IMO: