I hate the BCS (Bowl Championship Series). I think every college football fan pretty much loathes it. One thing I hate about it is I don't understand it. Something like it takes the ratings from the polls, combines it with some computer algorithm, the phase of the Moon, and what the tea leaves read and comes up with a top two teams who play a bowl game for the National Championship.
So, I'm pretty much excited by rumors of its demise. Unfortunately, what is being proposed isn't much better. According to Dan Wetzel at Yahoo! Sports, athletic directors are leaning toward a four-team play off which would be three games. The advantage is two of those games could be in the "big" bowls and the Rose Bowl could stay Pac-12/Big 10 which is important for some reason.
But this still has all the problems of the BCS in how do you choose the four teams? Would it still eliminate, for instance, an undefeated Boise State?
I've got a better system. I don't know how many bowl games there are right now but I bet there's at least 20. If you can't work this into the bowls we have now, there's something wrong.
There's twelve conferences (counting the independents as one conference). Take the conference champions and rank them based on the AP poll (if there's one that's not ranked, put them at the bottom. If there's more than one unranked, put them all at the bottom). Take the bottom 10 teams and like they do in the NCAA basketball tournament and match them up: #3 with #10, #4 with #9, etc. Play those five games in five bowls. You now have five teams. Bring in #2. Again, put the highest rank teams with the lowest ranked teams. That's three games in three bowls (we're up to 8) and three winners. Bring in #1. You're down to a football Final Four. Play two games on New Years Day in two "big" bowls (maybe rotate the games through the bowls that want them, or make them bid for them, putting more cash in the hands of the winning teams). Then on the second Saturday of the year, play the national championship game in a nice warm location. That's a total of 11 games to pick a champion, all of them can be bowl games except for the championship
Now the weakness I see with this system is the rankings because people are still going to complain that Boise State didn't get a fair shot (even though they get a chance to prove themselves against other conference champions). And the #2 team has a big advantage and the #1 team has a huge advantage perhaps making the AP poll have more clout than it should. Also, your big teams won't be playing your early games which might hurt TV ratings. Maybe if you picked the teams getting the byes at random. But then you might get some horrible team in the final four.
So it's not perfect. The other option is to pick four wildcards so you have 16 teams to start with. But how do you pick those four? Again, maybe the AP Poll (the four highest rank teams that aren't conference champions). And some people might bitch about Notre Dame is almost always going to be in the playoffs because the other independents are generally lousy (it'll come down to them or BYU) and there's only four teams in that "conference" anyway.
But that's my idea. And I think it's better than a BCS final four. The more teams that get to participate, the better.
And maybe that will shut up those Boise State fans.



