This is just one way that a playoff could have been done in 2002. This format gets everyone involved, makes it worthwhile to win your conference, doesn't totally screw the non-power conferences, doesn't force fans to make four bowl trips, doesn't get rid of the bowls, and would likely generate a boatload of revenue, even more than the BCS does now. Format 16 teams. Eight automatic qualifiers as conference champions, eight at-large bids. Automatic Bids ACC Champion.......Florida State......9-4 Big 12 Champion....Oklahoma .........11-2 Big East Champion..Miami (Fla.)......12-0 Big 10 Champion....Ohio State........13-0 SEC Champion.......Georgia............12-1 Pac-10 Champion...USC................10-2 In addition, the top two ranked (by poll or by BCS, however you want to do it) champions of the other five conferences get automatic bids. Sorry, Sun Belt, but you can't get an automatic bid, but you can have a chance to get in if South Florida has another 9-2 year. MAC Champion.................Marshall.......11-2 Mountain West Champion...Colorado St..10-3 (The champions of the Sun Belt, the WAC and Conference USA are, unfortunately, screwed. That puts North Texas (8-5), Boise State (11-1) and TCU (9-2) effectively where they are now anyway, in some sort of bowl game somewhere.) At-Large Bids Do it by the BCS or some formula like that, or just have a committee like they have for basketball. Someone's going to get screwed every year, just like in basketball, but by and large they get it right for hoops, I would imagine they could come up with the other 8 teams for a football playoff. Let's just say they're: Iowa Washington State Kansas State Notre Dame Texas Michigan Penn State Colorado Seedings Have the committee seed the teams. Use the polls, the BCS, an abacus, whatever you want. Your mileage may vary on where you'd put teams, but just for sake of argument, let's say they went like this: Seedings 1 Miami 2 Ohio State 3 Georgia 4 USC 5 Iowa 6 Washington State 7 Oklahoma 8 Kansas State 9 Notre Dame 10 Texas 11 Michigan 12 Penn State 13 Colorado 14 Florida State 15 Marshall 16 Colorado State So then you do your basic 1-16, 2-15, etc. The Tournament Starting on the Saturday after the end of the regular season (you'd have to do the Heisman ceremony some other time, probably. Maybe on the Sunday before.), at campus sites, the playoff begins. ABC might want to buy the whole package (though they may not be able to afford to), so let's say they use ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2 for the first round, and that Saturday is wall-to-wall college football (the NFL wouldn't do the Saturday games that it usually does after the college season ends, but no huge deal): Round of 16 Saturday, December 14 16 Colorado State at 1 Miami......3:30 ABC 9 Notre Dame at 8 Kansas State...8:00 ABC 12 Penn State at 5 Iowa...........1:00 ESPN 13 Colorado at 4 USC..............4:00 ESPN 11 Michigan at 6 Washington St...10:30 ESPN2 14 Florida State at 3 Georgia.....5:00 ESPN2 10 Texas at 7 Oklahoma............7:30 ESPN 15 Marshall at 2 Ohio State......12:00 ABC Just for argument's sake, let's say that a Top 8 team playing at home with all this at stake isn't going to lose, so seeds 1-8 advance, some in closer games than others. Quarterfinals Again, at campus sites, now on ABC and ESPN. Quarterfinals Saturday, December 21 8 Kansas State at 1 Miami.........8:00 ABC 5 Iowa at 4 USC...................4:00 ESPN 6 Washington State at 3 Georgia..12:00 ESPN 7 Oklahoma at 2 Ohio State........3:30 ABC Just for laughs, let's say Georgia fumbles late and loses to Washington State, just to make it interesting. The other home teams advance. Now you bring the major bowls into it. They'll have to shift their dates because New Year's falls in the middle of the week this year (that won't always be the case). But the Orange, Rose, Sugar, and Fiesta rotate through the two semifinals, the final and (most likely have to, just to keep them from being totally irrelevant every fourth year) a third-place game. Semifinals Saturday, December 28 1 Miami/4 USC.....................Orange Bowl 8:00 ABC 6 Wash. St./2 Ohio State.....Rose Bowl 3:30 ABC Hey, looky there. Miami/USC would be a great game, one everyone would want to see, with Carson Palmer going against the Hurricanes. The Orange Bowl gets the Hurricanes and a guaranteed sellout frenzy. The Rose Bowl (luckily) gets its Big 10/Pac 10 tradition in a meaningful game. But Miami and Ohio State advance to the final. Third Place Game Friday, January 3 4 USC/6 Washington St.............Sugar Bowl 8:00 ABC Short week for these two teams, and another trip across the country for fans, which is kind of a negative. And the Trojans would likely have just stayed in the Southeast and gone straight from Miami to New Orleans. Championship Saturday, January 4 1 Miami/2 Ohio State..............Fiesta Bowl 8:00 ABC So this Saturday, instead of the second NFL Wild Card Game, ABC could have the Fiesta Bowl (they could have the NFL games at 12:30 and 4:00, they way they did before last year). I still think Miami's going to win. And, oh, by the way, the other bowls don't have to go away. With 16 teams in the tournament, that leaves room for another 20 bowl games, and everybody who made a bowl this year could have gone to either the tournament or a bowl (you could even make it so that a first-round playoff loser could go to a bowl game if they got invited, but I don't know how well that would be received). You just make sure they're not playing on any of the Saturdays when the tournament is on, which means some shifting. But it does leave January 1 available (most years) for other bowls and other teams to shine, so couch potatos will still have a full slate of football on New Year's Day. As many times as I've looked at ways you might do a college football playoff, I haven't come up with the perfect way to do it that's going to appease everyone and work flawlessly. There are advantages and disadvantages to this system, there are advantages and disadvantages to a 2-team, a 4-team, or an 8-team system, there are pros and cons to a system using bowls at every level, campus sites, ABC, CBS, ESPN, using polls, using a committee, using the BCS, modifying the BCS, dumping the BCS altogether. It's not easy. It might be that one of the major reasons (besides inertia) a playoff is unlikely any time soon is that there are so many ways you could do it and so many different opinions about how you ought to do it, that gridlock will likely keep people from agreeing on the format. I'm not married to this format. Just presenting it as one way it could be done, and it looks to me like it would be fun as all hell to watch unfold.
This idea has been mentioned before(without a third-placed game though). Simply put, the bowls don't want it because currently they take in all revenue from the BCS. If there was a tournament than presumably the NCAA will get involved and take in some money.
Kudos to Kenn for figuring out using bowl games for the first two rounds would be a horrible idea. Of course, the reason this won't happen for a long long time is that the travel industry tends to out-pull other forces in many aspects of this level of college football... it's certainly worth a lot more money to them than the "potential national exposure" is to the usual suspect multi-national sponsor types. Blank stare for even the mention of a third-place game. Ick. A couple bricks launched for failing to notice that Boise State was ranked higher than both Marshall and Colorado State, but that's merely semantics.
Whirlwind's first sub-rule of BCS play: no team playing on blue astroturf is eligible for post-season play.
If you have a tournament with more than 4 teams, you run in to a problem with where you play the games. If you play them all on nuetral sites, then how do you get fans to travel to the early rounds? Most people are going to save their vacation time and travel dollars for the chance of seeing the championship, or at least a semi-final. This is less of a problem with a "final four" set-up, with the teams picked in a BCS-like manner. If you don't play them at nuetral sites, you'll have road games in late December in places like Ann Arbor, Madison, or East Lansing. This is not exactly a festive championship atmosphere. The solution to this problem doesn't have to be an elaborate 16 team playoff. A play-off of that type diminishes the regular season. Teams 5 thru 16 on you list blew their chance at a championship by losing games that they should have won. Why let them back in it now? Why does it have to be just like the NFL? Just add one game and turn the BCS into the final 4.
Were they not the Pac-10 Champs? My bad. ESPN.com lists them and Washington State at 7-1, but with USC at the top. Your mileage may vary, as mentioned. I'm not real keen on a third-place game, either, but you have, for better or worse, four major bowl games, and have to find a way to get them involved, I'd say. The only problem with a one-off after all the bowls is this: suppose the system "works" and matches two undefeated teams, #1 and #2, in a bowl game. Isn't the "national championship" the week after a bit of an anticlimax? Does Miami really need to play USC the week after? And, okay, put Boise State in if you like. Like it's going to make a difference. Come up with your own system, then.
There is no chance whatsoever of having a tournament with more than three rounds because of travel considerations. However, the basketball tournament has shown that fans will do three cities in three weeks if the stakes are high enough. If the NCAA went to eight teams and seven games in three weeks, they could do it within the present bowl system and have a win-win. Rotate the semis and final among the top seven bowls and play it out over the last two weeks of December and first or second week of January. For example, this year could have been: Dec 21 - Quarterfinals - Cotton, Citrus, Gator, Sugar Bowls (just pick four good bowls here) Dec 28th - Semifinals - Rose, Orange Bowls Jan 4th - Final - Fiesta Bowl You could even keep the conference affiliations for the quarterfinal bowls if desired (as long as it doesn't set up a #1 vs. #2 in the QF), thus allowing the QF bowls to keep their traditions.
The fact that they do it in Division I-AA, II, III, and NAIA notwithstanding. And when they gerrymandered the tournament this year to keep teams closer to home, even more fans attended, which lends me to belive that campus sites in the first two rounds would be the way to go. Again, that's three trips in three weeks, at a time of year when travel is (a) expensive, and (b) a pain in the neck because everyone travels on the holiday. Money tends to get tighter for the average fan in December, and if you try to book travel with six days' notice, it's going to be astronomical, plus tickets and accomodations. Fat cat boosters will be able to do it, but the rank and file (who might budget for one bowl trip a year if they're big on it) might not. There's going to be travel involved no matter what you do. I'm just trying to minimize it as best as possible. Look, the six power conferences have had the lion's share of Top 25 teams the last 10 years. Everybody else is pretty much out of the loop anyway, but you're not going to get their vote for any type of playoff unless you convince them there's something in it for them. And unless Boise State or Marshall can get a nice payday from being the 15th seed and going to the 2 seed (more than they'd net from taking 500 people to the Your Name Here Bowl), they're unlikely to vote for it. If you cut them out completely, you're unlikely to get their vote at all. Money will make a playoff happen, when it gets big enough, and it would be big. But it would have to be really big to overcome everyone's self-interest, because this is not just something you implement, it's something that people will have to compromise on. Whatever. Just throwing it out there. There are pros and cons to any system, and it's unlikely, IMHO, we'll see anything resembling a playoff before 2010. And, considering there are the occasional mis-steps, the current system isn't any worse, and in some ways may be a bit better, than the old Bowl Free-For-All we used to have.
A thought that gets stated in Boise now and then comes to mind: "Turf that is not real grass does not have the right to be green." Waiting for lemon-yellow FieldTurf in Eugene...
Yes, Washington State beat USC, so they're the Pac 10 Champions. My bad. Of course, Oklahoma took them apart, so there you go.
I think if you want to come up with a realistic idea for a playoff it is good to realize that a playoff already exists--it is just a 2-team playoff with a somewhat flawed formula to select the teams. Any possible improvement will be built from this basis. It is also useful to realize that the major bowls are powerful and will not submit to moving from Jan. 1/2 to Dec. 28 just to host a semifinal or quarterfinal or whatever. There isn't going to be a 16-team monstrosity that suddenly replaces the current system. Personally I wouldn't want to see such a thing. One of the things that is great about college football is that every week has a great excitement from knowing that a single loss can seriously damage your championship prospects, and two losses are pretty much deadly. If you're a national championship contender, every game from September to January is a playoff game. If you want to see a playoff system, try to think of ways to expand the current 2-team playoff to a 4-team playoff. Here's my idea: Add a 5th bowl to the BCS mix. The Cotton Bowl would be a good fit, but whoever can bring in the sponsorship dollars gets it. The top 4 teams in the BCS rankings (or whatever rankings are agreed upon) qualify for the 4-team playoff. 2 of the 5 BCS bowls host semifinals in their regular Jan 1/2 timeframe. 1 BCS bowl hosts the championship a week or so later. The other 2 BCS bowls just function as old-fashioned New Year's Day bowls matching up the remaining major conference champions plus at-large teams if needed. Champions of the 6 BCS conferences are guaranteed to play in at least one of the non-playoff BCS games. It a five year cycle, a bowl would host one championship game, 2 semifinals, and 2 regular bowl games. This year we could have seen: Playoff: Orange Bowl: (1) Miami (Big East champ) vs. (4) USC (at-large) Sugar Bowl: (2) Ohio State (Big Ten champ) vs. (3) Georgia (SEC champ) Fiesta Bowl: national championship Remaining BCS: Rose Bowl: Washington State (Pac-10 champ) vs. Iowa (at-large) Cotton Bowl: Oklahoma (Big 12 champ) vs. Florida State (ACC champ) One flaw in my system would occur if 3 or more of the top 4 were at-large teams. Then there wouldn't be room for the 6 BCS champions in this system. This is highly unlikely, but some kind of contigency plan would be needed.
you want playoffs? fine.. how many teams get in?? 8?? 16?? look at basketball where the top 65 teams get in. if that happened in college football, you'd never have an off-season. Even too, the basketball playoffs started small and grew large. also, would the NFL want to give up saturdays to college football?? they'd probably throw a major stink about having to do so.
If there had been a playoff this year, I would've picked Oklahoma to win it all. Their defense can stop even Tony Meola from his daily round of doughnuts.