Chris Kuehnhold
Author
From the onset of the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) in 1998, complaints about fairness and having the “right” teams involved have been the largest discussion on an annual basis. Including the onset of the CFP (College Football Playoff) in 2014, those discussions still exist. Debate rages every year regarding who should and shouldn’t be in. I have the perfect solution!
In today’s world of college football, realignment is all the furor. Who is going where? What conference does team X go to? If we are going to do realignment, let’s do REAL realignment. Let’s get rid of the conferences altogether. Just junk it all as we currently know it and have TRUE realignment. By doing this, you can create the simplest and perfect playoff scenario that has ever existed. Want to know more? Keep reading because I have a plan!
For starters, we are going to limit the Football Bowl Subdivision to 96 teams. Only those schools with the highest graduation rates will be allowed to participate at the FBS level. One of the failures, as I see it in college football today, is forgetting that these football players are still student-athletes. Note, if you will, that it is not an athlete-student. Therefore, with them still being student-athletes, we must find a way to make academics important in college football again. We will revisit the graduation rates every four years. If you are not graduating your players and a school at the Football Championship Subdivision has a higher graduation rate, you will get bumped out of the 96 teams in FBS.
Now, to even things out, we divide these 96 teams into 8 newly formed conferences with 12 teams each. You build these based on regional locations, taking into consideration historical rivalries. This process should not be too difficult. You want a rivalry like Alabama and Auburn together, just as you would want Florida and Florida State, Iowa and Iowa State or any other rivalry. We’ll revisit the new conferences at a later date.
Now we market this newfound system by having a lottery every year in July. This would be before fall practice and camps begin. In this lottery, conferences will draw numbers 1-8. We have to keep this simple. The number drawn in July represents where each conference will line up come playoff time. The actual playoff will follow be 1 v 8, 2 v 7, 3 v 6, and 4 v 5 pattern.
This eliminates polling and human opinion/bias from the playoff completely. How? Because it is predetermined where you line up for your playoff games. For this lottery, you air it on live TV. You sell advertising for it. You can even have guests draw the numbers for each conference. For instance, Conference A brings in Peyton Manning to draw because Tennessee is a member of Conference A. That helps to draw interest.
Now for scheduling and determining who gets into the playoffs. 12 teams in each conference are divided into two divisions of six teams each. Each team will play all 11 other members in their conference. For the 12th game, you will be required to develop a home and away series with a school from the FCS that is local to you. We have to share the wealth, right?
For determining your conference champion, we take each division’s winners. The division winners are based on record within the division only. For instance, if a team goes 5-0 against its division opponents, it is easy to say they are the best team in their division. They would advance to the conference championship.
Ok, I hear you, what if they are 6-6 overall and the team in 2nd place is 11-1 overall? Well, the easy answer is always going to be head-to-head. It is time we get back to every game matters and head-to-head competition taking a front seat. If you beat every team in your own division, you are unequivocally the best team in your division.
Now, for playoff purposes, you can either have a 16 team playoff featuring conference championships as the first round or you can have an 8 team playoff featuring only the conference champions. Either way works out perfectly. You still line up the playoffs in the 1 v 8 format based on the lottery held in July.
I understand that sometimes you could have the #1-ranked and #2-ranked teams face each other in the first round. My rebuttal to that is that in this system, polls are no longer needed. Teams won’t be selected for the playoffs based on their ranking. It is strictly decided by play on the field.
In the end, college football fans are growing increasingly frustrated with the current landscape. Often, fans don’t even know which conference certain teams are in these days. By going down this road, we will see a more solid platform with greater competition-and maybe even some new rivalries along the way. I believe this is the best option going forward, and once in place, the vast majority of fans will, too.
