Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Break it on down.

Michael Adams, chairman of the NCAA executive committee (and President of the University of Georgia), has recently publicly proposed a college football playoff. Talk about a long time coming... Of course little can happen before the 2010 bowl season is complete, and a lot of negotiation is needed, but we've come a long way from "that'll never happen." With a playoff in mind, I too wanted to contribute with a plan based on the BCS poll before the bowl season began.

To recap, the BCS looked like this on December 2.
1. Ohio State
2. LSU
3. Virginia Tech
4. Oklahoma
5. Georgia
6. Missouri
7. USC
8. Kansas
9. West Virginia
10. Hawai'i
11. Arizona State
12. Florida
13. Illinois
14. Boston College

In my world, the top two teams would get a bye week, and the remaining 12 would play on December 8, in a typical seeding set up. Therefore;

3. Virginia Tech vs. 14. Boston College
4. Oklahoma vs. 13. Illinois
5. Georgia vs. 12. Florida
6. Missouri vs. 11. Arizona State
7. USC vs. 10. Hawai'i
8. Kansas vs. 9. West Virginia

The winners would advance and play the next week, December 15, and would be re-seeded. Therefore;

1. Ohio State vs. 8. West Virginia
2. LSU vs. 7. USC
3. Virginia Tech vs. 6. Missouri
4. Oklahoma vs. 5. Georgia

Again, on December 22, re-seeded. Therefore;

1. Georgia vs. 4. West Virginia
2. Missouri vs. 3. USC

The winners (Georgia and USC) now have 10 days to prepare for a New Year's Day BCS National Championship Bowl Game.

The remaining teams would be re-seeded in the order they lost, to play #3 vs. #4, #5 vs. #6, etc., each in a BCS bowl (ie. Sugar, Rose, Orange, Fiesta and TBD) on January 1 leading up to the BCS Championship later that night.

Fiesta: 3. Missouri vs. 4. West Virginia
Orange: 5. Ohio State vs. 6. LSU
Rose: 7. Virginia Tech vs. 8. Oklahoma
Sugar: 9. Kansas vs. 10. Hawai'i
TBD: 11. Arizona State vs. 12. Florida
TBD2: 13. Illinois vs. 14. Boston College

Of course, each conference would have to play a conference championship (I'm talking to you, Pac-10 and Big-10 (11)), and (in my world), the remaining 26 bowls would be paired down to 8, giving us only 15 bowls. They would be played out between the final seeding of the BCS teams on December 22 and January 1.

If the season must be shortened by a game, everyone gets rid of their match-up with the weakest non-BCS conference school before conference play begins. This (relatively) strengthens the overall schedules, lessens wear and tear, and pares a game off a long season. If the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA), Division II and Division III college football can all figure out a playoff, so can Division 1-A, the so-called premier division in college football.

3 comments:

Andrew said...

Wow you put a lot of thought into that. I like the way you did it and how it would work out. Especially the part about getting rid of all those crappy meaningless bowl games. Hopefully we will see something like this in the future; but I'm not holding my breath.

Mikey said...

I like the idea of a playoff, however, I have one big issue with your idea. I would prefer a smaller pool of candidates. A 14 team playoff causes the national championship teams to be playing their 4th postseason game. In my eyes, that is too many. I would prefer an 8 team playoff (with no byes) or a 6 team playoff (with 1st round byes for the #1 and #2 teams). At this point, anything would be better than Hawaii vs. Georgia or USC vs. Illinois.

MRD said...

AMEN