A Reasonable Playoff System for College Football

I’m not a big fan of the BCS and never have been, but this year’s so-called championship game--a rematch of one of the more lackluster regular-season games of the year featuring one team that didn’t even win its division, never mind its conference--is too much. If we’re going to have a ‘championship game’ in the top level of NCAA football, let’s do what every other sport in the entire world (including every other division of the NCAA) does to determine its championship: have a playoff. Settle the matter on the field, with all qualified teams getting a shot. If you settle the matter with polls and computer rankings instead of actual games, it’s not a championship. It’s a beauty pageant.

If I were the King of College Football, here is what I would do.

Now, I’m not saying we have to scrap the BCS entirely. We can still use it as a means to determine who gets into the playoff and how they are seeded. But once the tournament field is announced, the BCS ranking system is done for the year. Thank you for your help. Anyway, the details of the plan are outlined below, with examples from the recently-concluded season.

1. Cut the regular season back to 11 games, with a 12th game for the conference championship in conferences with 12 or more members. Thanksgiving weekend would be the last weekend of the regular season.

2. Hold a 20-team playoff beginning the first week of December. The playoff would use a modified 16-team bracket with four play-in games. The National Championship Game would be held the first Saturday in January.

3. The first two rounds of the playoffs, plus the play-in games, would be held at campus sites. The top 8 seeds, and the four higher-ranked teams in the play-in games, would host playoff games. In the round of 8, the four highest remaining seeds would host the games. Teams would not be re-seeded after each round.

4. All 11 conference champions get an automatic bid. The remaining at-large bids go to the 9 highest-ranked teams not winning a conference championship. No conference would get more than 3 total bids.

5. The top 8 seeds--and correspondingly, the home games in the first round, would go to the six highest-ranked conference champions and the two highest-ranked remaining teams. If the 7th and 8th highest-ranked conference champions are ranked higher than any of the at-large teams, they would get those two remaining seeds in the top 8.

6. All seeds after the top 8 are assigned in order of BCS ranking, or if unranked in the BCS, by win-loss record.

7. The 13th through 20th seeded teams play the play-in games the first Saturday in December at campus sites: 20th at 13th, 19th at 14th, 18th at 15th, and 17th at 16th.

8. The round of 16 is played the second Saturday in December at campus sites. The 16/17 winner plays at the 1st seed, the 15/18 winner at the 2nd seed, the 14/19 winner at the 3rd seed, the 20/13 winner at the 4th seed, 12th seed at 5th seed, 11th seed at 6th seed, 10th seed at 7th seed, and 9th seed at 8th seed.

9. The quarterfinal round is played the third Saturday of December at campus sites following the normal 16-team bracket.

10. The semifinal round is played the fourth Saturday in December (unless it falls on Christmas, in which case it will be played on Friday night) at neutral sites. These may be traditional bowl game sites (Rose Bowl, Cotton Bowl, etc.) or other appropriate venues. Sites for semifinal and final games will be chosen well in advance of the start of the season.

11. The national Championship Game will be played the first Saturday in January at a neutral site. The winner of this game will be declared the undisputed, honest-to-goodness National Champion of college football.

The bowl system will still exist; it just won’t be a part of the national championship conversation any more. If they wish, teams involved in the playoff may still choose to play in a bowl game if their schedule permits (e.g., if they lose in the first two or three weekends).

Based on this year’s final BCS results, here are the seeds for this year’s playoff, if there were to be one. (BCS rankings are given in parentheses; conference champions are noted with an asterisk.)

1. *LSU (1)
2. Alabama (2)
3. *Oklahoma State (3)
4. Stanford (4)
5. *Oregon (5)
6. *Wisconsin (10)
7. *Clemson (15)
8. *TCU (18)
9. Arkansas (6)
10. Boise State (7)
11. Kansas State (8)
12. Virginia Tech (11)
13. Baylor (12)
14. Michigan (13)
15. Michigan State (17)
16. *Southern Mississippi (21)
17. *West Virginia (23)
18. *Arkansas State (NR, 10-2)
19. *Northern Illinois (NR, 10-3)
20. *Louisiana Tech (NR, 8-4)

The play-in games would have been as follows.

- Louisiana Tech at Baylor
- Northern Illinois at Michigan
- Arkansas State at Michigan State
- West Virginia at Southern Mississippi

The Round of 16 games would have featured the following games:

- West Virginia/Southern Mississippi at LSU
- Arkansas State/Michigan State at Alabama
- Northern Illinois/Michigan at Oklahoma State
- Louisiana Tech/Baylor at Stanford
- Virginia Tech at Oregon
- Kansas State at Wisconsin
- Boise State at Clemson
- Arkansas at TCU

Winners advance as in the NCAA basketball tournaments: Elite Eight, Final Four, and ultimately the Championship game between the last two teams standing.

This way, if we end up with a championship game rematch between two teams from the same division of the same conference, we really will know they are the two best teams because they will have beaten all the other candidates. No self-interested or inattentive voters, no mysterious computer rankings, just on-field results.

That’s how a championship should be decided.