The first Bowl Championship Series standings of the year came out this past weekend with two Southeastern Conference teams at the top.
As always, everyone will start complaining that teams will be left out of the national championship game despite being undefeated. But I have a solution that will satisfy those who want to implement a playoff system and those who love the current system.
As the current system stands, there are 119 bowl-eligible teams and 35 bowl games, which means that more than half of the eligible teams are going to bowl games. This is crucial to mid-major schools (such as Buffalo) that need the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars for reaching a bowl game.
An eight or even 16-team playoff system would crush some programs that rely on exposure from bowl games, money from accepting the bid and the money from television rights. This would also add three games to some teams' schedules, which athletic directors wouldn't allow.
So here is the billion-dollar idea:
You keep every single bowl game. Every team that traditionally gets a bowl bid will continue to get one. The change comes with the format of the BCS games.
Four BCS games stay the same. The Rose, Fiesta, Sugar and Orange Bowls all keep their contracts with the six automatic-qualifying conference winners.
However, a fifth game will be played in a new state-of-the-art stadium to allow two other national champion hopefuls into the mix. This leaves four spaces for a runner up in the automatic qualifying conferences or undefeated teams from a mid-major conference to play for the title.
From the five winners of those games, a committee (we all know how much the NCAA loves committees) will determine who will play in the national championship game.
The problem always arises when three undefeated teams and the winner of the SEC that has one loss are all worthy of a title shot. The argument is that a team like Boise State would not be undefeated if they played in the SEC. So this is where you determine if teams like Boise are worthy of a national title shot.
So here's an example: undefeated Boise State plays the SEC winner and undefeated Ball State (before it played Buffalo in the Mid-American Conference title game) takes on the Pac-12 winner, Stanford. That would narrow down the teams worthy of a national title game.
Normally, there are three or four teams that are named worthy of a national title birth. With LSU and Alabama both from the SEC at the top of the standings, people are scared that they will play each other in the title game because they are in the same division and cannot play each other in the conference championship game.
Another plus is a team that wins the Big East or Big 12 (or Big 6, as it may soon become) will still get its bid (and money) despite not having a chance at the National Title.
There are flaws in my system that can be fixed. Such as an undefeated team must be in the top 10 or 15 in the BCS standings to get a chance to play in a BCS game.
To sum up, this structure serves two purposes. First, it allows as many teams as possible to get rewarded for playing in a bowl game. And second, more importantly, it narrows the number of the teams that should be in the national title game from three or four to two. There should never be a split national title (like in 2003), and a team should never win the National Championship Game and worry if it will have to split the title.
This system only adds one game to the schedule, and it would be played before the start of the second semester so players won't miss any more school. Mid-major teams will get their money and the best teams will figure out who truly belongs in the title game.
Email: sports@ubspectrum.com
