Let’s face it: bowl games, save for the BCS and the major ones on New Years Day (and beyond), don’t really matter to most college football fans, save for “hey, there’s a game on tonight” crowd. When the NCAA mandated that six win teams could go to bowls so long as they won those six against six Football Bowl Subdivision teams, it meant that 6-6 teams could go to mediocre bowls and get the chance to try and have a winning season. While it might seem okay for a 6-6 team to still have a chance to go to a bowl, it takes away what made the bowls special to begin with.
So how do we make them mean something again? It’s simple: push the mandated amount of wins to seven and allow some teams to accept more than one bowl bid. So long as at least six or seven days are between games, why not let these 8-4 or 9-3 teams have two shots at bowl glory? How about those 10-2 and 11-1 teams that just couldn’t make it to the BCS? Why not give them a chance to play in some massive dream match-ups?
But better yet, why not allow those 10-2 and 11-1 teams a chance to get into the BCS anyway? How so? By expanding the BCS into a de facto playoff system where four teams can come out of it and play for the national title! Here’s how:
First: set up a “minor” BCS, with some of the more historic early bowl games serving as de facto round of sixteen games for the coveted BCS spots. This could set up a twelve to sixteen team playoff, depending on how the BCS bowls handle the wild card slots generated by these “minor” BCS games. You could still reserve the Rose Bowl for the Big Ten and Pac 12 champions, as well as the Sugar Bowl for the SEC champions, and perhaps even bring back the old Orange Bowl alliance for the Big 12 champions.
Once we get down to the final four, you could hold the national semifinals at neutral sites, either those who host BCS games, those who host major bowls that aren’t BCS (like Dallas or Atlanta), or sites that host no bowl game at all (like Indianapolis or St. Louis). These games could be held the day before the AFC and NFC championship games, giving all football fans the first of three tremendous weekends of championship football.
The national championship game would be held the week before the Super Bowl at a neutral site, preferable one not hosting the next week’s Super Bowl. It would be perfect for a Sunday night college football finale, and would be a perfect lead-in for ESPN to link it to their NFL draft coverage two and a half months later.
Will this happen? I doubt it, but I do believe that a playoff system is coming. The public is solidly behind the idea, and more and more coaches, players, analysts, and alumni are coming around with each passing year. About the only serious opposition is with the bowl committees and college administrators, as well as the conference presidents, but they face the potential of Congress coming after them should the economy improve and the public be more open to Capitol Hill pressing the college football powers to put forth a playoff system and scrap the old bowl system.
My best guess is that there will be a playoff system that will use the bowl system in some way. Some of the small bowls will probably go away to make way for the early rounds of the playoffs, which would be for the best, as it might make way for games that actually mean something again. It would give every team no matter how small the conference in the FBS at least a theoretical chance of hoisting the crystal football, which is how it is with every other sport in this country, save for FBS Division One football. With that in place, it would make the regular season even more intense!