The Ideal College Football Playoff System

Since its inception, major college football has lacked the ability to crown a true, undisputed national champion. Unlike nearly every other NCAA sanctioned sport, major college football has no playoff system that pits the best teams against each other to decide who is number one. Instead, college football has developed an alternative method of post-season play designed to reward the best teams from around the country for their accomplishments. This system is the current menagerie of post-season contests called “bowls.”

The first of these bowl games was played way back in 1902, when Michigan defeated Stanford 49-0 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. The origin of the term “bowl game” comes from the shape of the Rose Bowl stadium where the game was played because it just happened to resemble a bowl. Over time, more bowl games began to be played around the country at the culmination of the football season, usually in late December or early January. The teams chosen to participate in bowl games were the most successful and popular teams that would be able to draw a large crowd to the game, even though the location of the game may have been held hundreds of miles away from the home cities of each particular school.

While these bowl games were meant to reward and celebrate the “winningest” schools, a problem arose as the popularity of the sport grew and more bowl games were added. Increasingly, more schools were finishing their seasons with undefeated records and it was unclear who should be named college football’s national champion. This problem was “fixed” by having sports writers vote in ranking polls to elect the number one team in the country. However, just like the bowls, multiple polls began springing up, each naming different teams as their number one. The culmination of this national championship quandary was brought to a head at the end of the 1997 football season. That year, two teams had distinguished themselves as the two best teams in college football, 11-0 Michigan and 12-0 Nebraska. While it may have made sense that they simply play each other in a bowl game to determine who was number one, the tradition of nearly a century of bowl games dictated that Michigan, the champion of the Big Ten Conference, must play in the Rose Bowl, while Nebraska, the champion of the Big 12 Conference must play in the Orange Bowl. Thus both teams went on to win their respective bowl games and each was named national champion in two separate major polls (Michigan the AP Poll and Nebraska the USA Today Poll).

As a result of the now glaring problem, the Bowl Championship Series, or BCS, was formed to help merge the process of bowl games and determining a national champion. Through the use of combining the ranking polls with a complex mathematical system, the BCS ranked the top twenty-five teams in the country, determining which schools would play in the top tier bowl games and which two top teams would play in the National Championship Game. While this system would have solved the problem of Michigan/Nebraska in 1997, it soon failed just as horribly as the old way when three teams finished the regular system undefeated. Because there are so many teams across the nation that play very different opponents in very different conferences, it is hard to say who is the best when multiple teams won all of their games. The BCS is also flawed in that it was founded by and currently funded and ran by the deemed six major college football conferences. This has resulted in a bias towards schools that play in the major conferences. It is assumed that they have played and beaten tougher competition in their leagues than in the so-called, "lower tier conferences." Repeatedly, schools such as Utah, Boise State, Hawaii, and TCU have gone undefeated, but have been left out of the National Championship game because schools such as Florida, Ohio State, LSU, Oklahoma, and Oregon, teams from “power conferences,” were regarded as better teams regardless of the fact that they did not have undefeated records. Now, with the U.S. Government beginning to investigate the fairness of the BCS, it is important to lay out a plan that will incorporate the rich tradition of college football, without sacrificing the ability to crown a true national champion.

First things first, not every college football team can be treated as equals. This is not the NFL. One of the things that makes college football great is its diversity across the country. However, with that diversity comes inherent differences. These differences range from the location of each school, the size of each school, the conference in which each team participates, the past success of each team, the amount of support and funding each team receives, and the ability of each team to recruit student athletes, hire coaches, and built competitive athletic facilities. A playoff system must take into account these varying differences, while also allowing every FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision, or Division I) team the ability to earn the right to play for a national championship.

Tradition is perhaps the greatest asset of sports, and in particular major college football. The bowl games are a major part of that rich tradition. Bowls allow teams to celebrate a successful season by traveling somewhere in the country that is perhaps somewhere they’ve never been before, a warmer climate during the cold of winter, or even just another game to play together as a team. In no way should they be eliminated, reduced, or altered. Instead, a playoff system needs to be incorporated into the bowl system so as to improve its tradition and determine a number one team. Nor should the BCS be completely removed, as it has still proven to be an effective tool for ranking college football teams. What needs to happen is certain top tier bowl games need to be incorporated into a playoff system where the top eight teams, as determined by conference championship games and the BCS, will play in a series of bowl games throughout December with the culmination being the top two teams playing for the National Championship in early January. Here is an example of this system using the 2010 football season with projected possible outcomes:

With this setup, the conference champions from the six major conferences would each get an automatic birth in a specific first-round bowl game. The two remaining spots would be given to the two most eligible non-major conference teams, as determined by the BCS. By “most eligible” it is meant they must win their conference and be highly ranked. The BCS would also be used to determine a conference champion if there is not a conference championship game, as is currently the case in the Big 12 and Big East, as well as several non-major conferences.

The first round of playoff bowl games would be played approximately two weeks after the conference championship games, which would be played the first week in December. The second round of games would be played on January 1^st, as to maintain the tradition of the Rose Bowl. The National Championship game would be played approximately two weeks later in mid-January. The normal cavalcade of bowl games that is played throughout December would still be played as usual and would actually be helped by this playoff format by having a lesser bowl game played before a playoff game as a lead-in that would draw more TV viewers than it otherwise would. A greater emphasis would also be placed on winning the conference championship, thus increasing the importance and popularity of the regular season and conference games. This ideal playoff scenario is more of a tweak to the current system rather than a complete overhaul. It maintains the bowl game traditions while effectively determining a undisputed national champion that major college football so desperately needs.