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(Warning: This is a long post. Stop reading if you’re not interested in detailed bowl/playoff proposals.)

In making a playoff series that is amenable to the conference commissioners, bowl committees, and college presidents, any playoff or plus one system must address the following:

Conference commissioners

• The regular season must be meaningful.
• Conference championships (either with or without a title game) are important.
• Champions of BCS conferences are represented.
• Champions of non-BCS conferences and independents are represented if highly ranked.

BCS Bowl Committees

• The current bowl system is kept intact.
• Traditional matchups are maintained as best as possible (e.g. Pac-10 vs. Big-10 in Rose Bowl).

College Presidents

• Football season does not extend into the spring semester.
• Football season should not be exceedingly long.

Fans

• Have a playoff.

Here is a bowl/playoff system that hopefully deals with all of the problems above.

Playoff selection

• Take the champions of every conference and the top-ranked independent (by BCS ratings) and put these teams in the championship pool. For conferences without a championship game, BCS ranking will be the tie-breaker.
• Take the six highest ranked teams from the championship pool and put them into a six-team playoff. The top two teams would get a bye, with #3 hosting #6 and #4 hosting #5.
• The wild card round will be held the week after the conference championship games, with the semifinals held the following week.

Using 2007 as an example, this would be the playoff seedings (with BCS ranking in parentheses):

• #1 Ohio State (1) hosts the winner of #6 West Virginia (9) at #3 Virginia Tech (3).
• #2 LSU (2) hosts the winner of #5 USC (7) at #4 Oklahoma.

The benefits of this system are that they make winning your conference paramount, putting extreme importance on conference games. Conference championship games would garner immense interest, since they are de-facto playoff games.

However, BCS conference championship games are not an automatic path into the playoff, since the team must be one of the six best in the championship pool. If the conference champion of a BCS school is weaker than either a top independent or non-BCS conference champion, then they do not make the playoffs. As an example, here would be the seedings for the controversial 2004 season, with playoff teams in bold (and BCS ranking in parentheses):

#1 USC 12-0 (1)
#2 Oklahoma 12-0 (2)
#3 Auburn 12-0 (3)
#4 Utah 11-0 (4)
#5 Virginia Tech 10-2 (8)
#6 Boise State 11-0 (9)
#7 Louisville 10-1 (10)
#8 Iowa 9-2 (12)
#9 Pittsburgh 8-3 (21)
…

Note that the champions of the Big 10 and Big East would not have made the playoffs, due to their poor seasons and the excellent seasons by Utah and Boise State.

However, the champions of major conferences should still be rewarded for winning their conference. So as a reward, the bowl system would remain intact and these teams would make up a separate BCS bowl system. This would be an eight-team BCS bowl pool, which would consist of the following teams:

• The losers of the wild-card and semifinal rounds of the BCS playoff. (4 teams)
• Any conference champions from the BCS conferences that did not make the playoff round. (0-3 teams)
• If no independent or non-BCS conferene champion team makes the playoff round, the top ranked team from this pool. (1 team)
• The highest ranked BCS teams that were not conference champions fill out the remaining spots (0-3 teams). One possible twist on this is to only allow one team per conference via this method.

For 2007, the “bowl” teams would be the following

• Non-conference champs
  Georgia (5)
  Missouri (6)
  Kansas (8) (or Boston College (11), if only allowing one team per conference)

• Best conference champion/independent left out of playoffs
  Hawaii (10)

• Four playoff losers

Bowls could then select teams from this pool, maintaining traditional bowl/conference affiliations when possible. For example, here would be potential bowl matchups if LSU and USC made the national title game (traditional bowl/conference affiliations in bold):

Championship - USC v LSU
Orange - Virginia Tech vs. Missouri
Rose - Ohio State vs. Kansas/B.C.
Fiesta - Oklahoma vs. Hawaii
Sugar - Georgia vs. West Virginia

Note that non-conference champions would be chosen only based on BCS ranking. This would ensure that BCS snubs (e.g. Illinois for Missouri in 2007) do not happen.

Furthermore, this system would also ensure traditional matchups if teams from those conferences are available. For example, if there are available teams from the Pac-10 and Big-10 (either from playoff losers or non-BCS champions), then there would be a traditional Rose Bowl matchup.

Benefits

This system addresses nearly all of the problems with the current bowl system. Only allowing conference champions ensures that every conference game is meaningful. Non-conference games are also meaningful, since conference champion rank decide whether the team either makes the playoff or gets a bye into the semifinals. Furthermore, it rewards teams that would have made it directly into the championship game (under the old system) by giving them a bye into the semifinals.

This system also allows independents with fantastic seasons into the playoffs (e.g. Boise State in 2006, Utah and Boise State in 2004), while punishing weak BCS-conference champions (e.g. Iowa and Pittsburgh in 2004).

The current bowl system is kept intact, with bowls having the same meaning as they do now (as consolation games that reward good seasons). Furthermore, traditional matchups will be maintained except when traditional conference champions are in the title game, as now.

Finally, the football season would not be exceedingly long, and would not stretch into the spring semester past the current bowl setup. An example season would is below:

Example 2007 season

• 13 week regular season, with an 11 game regular season. From August 30th until November 23rd.
• Conference championship game (December 1st)
• Playoff wild card round (December 8th)
• Playoff semifinal (December 15th)
• Bowl season (December 20th to January 1st)
• Championship game (January 7th)

All teams would be done playing by January 7th.

Potential criticisms

2007 Georgia

In my system, Georgia does not make the playoffs. This may seem crazy (especially to Georgia fans this year and the UGA president). However, college football is essentially a regional game, with teams playing most of their games either within conference or within their region. As Bill Harris noted, since college football is regional, it is impossible tell which teams are the best. I may think that the SEC is the strongest conference in the nation, but I don’t truly know if (for example) the Big 12 is stronger this year since there are so few matchups between SEC and Big 12 teams during the regular season. One can come up with various formulas and rankings to decide what conference is better and which team is better. But the best way to decide this is on the field. Using conference champions allows for conferences to present their strongest team and decide who is best in a playoff system.

2007 Hawaii

Interestingly, undefeated Hawaii did not make the playoffs under my system. This is a bit of an aberration, as every undefeated independent would have made the playoffs under this system (Boise State in 2006, Utah and Boise State in 2004, Marshall in 1999, Tulane in 1998). This aberration is due to two factors. First is the relative strength of the BCS conference champions this year, with no weak champions like FSU (22nd in the BCS) in 2005 or Pittsburgh (21st in the BCS) in 2004. Second is the weakness of Hawaii’s schedule. Their weak schedule led to a low poll (10th) and computer (14th) rank.

However, I think the omission of Hawaii is actually a strength of the system, because it encourages powerful schools in non-BCS conferences to avoid cupcake schedules (and the resulting low BCS ranking). For example, in 2004 Boise State beat Oregon State and Utah defeated both Texas A&M and Arizona. Without these solid non-conference games, these teams likely would not have been ranked highly enough to make this six-team playoff.

…

Overall, this is a playoff/bowl system that emphasizes the regular season, has national appeal, keeps traditional bowls intact, is limited to the fall semester, and (most importantly) decides a true national champion. In a later post, I will lay out why this system is better than the current bowl system and other proposals (seeded and unseeded plus one systems, 8- and 16-team playoff systems, and the current bowl system).