A New College Football BCS Bowl Playoff System

It’s that time of year again. The BCS is about to make a mockery of the college football season by excluding a number of qualified teams from its sacred bowls. Coaches will cry foul, congress will get involved and fans will be left to wonder what might have been if the climax to the college football season had actually been decided on the field, rather than on the BCS’s super computers.

The sad fact about this annual holiday ritual is that the solution is so simple that a pee wee league football player could have come up with it. The NCAA doesn’t seem to realize how simple it would be to have its cake and eat it too. Simply have an 8 team playoff at current bowl sites, played on roughly the same dates, with all the accompanying parades and pageantry, and voilà-you get to keep your bowls (and all the money they generate), and have a playoff too (and make even more money). Everyone involved will make much more money, which seems to be the chief concern, because there will be more games, of better quality and the excitement they generate could eventually come to rival the greatest playoff system currently in existence–March Madness.

Here is a model of the system our team at revevolution.net has constructed using current BCS rules and rankings. That means we have to let in all 6 major conference champs-even The Big East’s-and any team from a non-automatic qualifying conference that is ranked high enough, as Houston is this year.

There are 7 games played over a 3 week period at the 4 BCS bowl sites. One site hosts 2 games, including the championship, as is currently the case. The other 2 sites rotate between second tier bowl locations. We have selected 2 randomly for this model.

These are certainly not the best 8 teams in college football, but they are the first 8 teams that would qualify for BCS bowls if the season were to end on Thanksgiving weekend. Apologies to Stanford, who would likely get an at-large berth before Houston, but they didn’t win the PAC 12 title, and we thought the bracket would be more interesting with a non-AQ team in it. We’ve taken the liberty of projecting conference champions and winners in each of the rounds to demonstrate how the system would play out.

This playoff system would clearly benefit everyone involved. That includes players, who would get to play in games that actually mean something, unlike many bowl games that some teams don’t take very seriously. And they would all play the same number of games-except 4 teams would play an extra game, and 2 lucky teams would play 2 additional games. Division 2, 3 and FCS playoff teams can play up to 5 additional games in the post season, so the old excuse about student athletes missing class time doesn’t really apply. These games all occur over the Christmas-New Year Holiday, so students wouldn’t miss any class time anyway. Teams that don’t qualify for the playoffs would still play in second and third tier bowl games like they do presently.

A playoff system formed around the NCAA’s current bowl structure is really a no-brainer. Corporate sponsors would still get to stamp there logos all over the college football postseason, universities and TV networks would make even more money, local communities would still get to have their bowl festivities and fans would get to see bowl games that actually mean something for a change. Hopefully the NCAA will figure all this out soon, so fans don’t have to endure too many more seasons where the fate of the college football season is left to the BCS and its super computers.


People also view

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *