[pvn]

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1) Go back to the traditional bowl games and abolish the BCS.

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I like this idea, but it's never going to happen. You can't keep bowl games AND eliminate the BCS. There's just no way with how things are structured.

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2) Allow the conferences to schedule their own games (using transparent methodology).

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I'm not sure what you mean here.

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3) Teams will be allowed to choose three out of conference games of their choice (consistent with conference rules).

4) Each team will have one mandatory bye week.

5) The NCAA will schedule one out of conference game for each team. This will be done by a "competition committee." The purpose will be to act as a mid-season "playoff" game. This will place teams judged to be of comparable quality against each other. Obviously this will be an imperfect, subjective process, but the purpose will be to try and eliminate as many teams from being undefeated as possible. They would alos try to avoid like bowl matchups (so no Pac10 versus Big10, etc). (Likely match ups for this system if it were run this year might be UC-Berkeley vs. Florida, LSU vs. tOSU , and USC vs. Oklahoma.)

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Step 5 is too complicated, I think.

I have a similar idea, but scaled back somewhat. Expand the regular season to 13 or 14 games, and require the major conferences to use those extra games to schedule intra-conference games. Every year, you'd have a *minimum* of X SEC-Big12 matchups, Big10-Pac10, etc. It wouldn't be too hard to work this out on a rotation. Basically every team in a major conference would have two games against other major conference teams, home and home, of course. This would provide *tons* more data for making cross-conference comparisons.

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6) A National Championship game will be held ten days after the premier bowls. This will occur between the two teams voted #1 and #2 in the current coaches poll.

Not perfect -- far from it. The main purpose of this system is to preserve (read: restore) the integrity of the old bowl system, while trying to maximize the possibility of eliminating as many undefeated teams as possible.

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I don't know why everyone is so married to the idea of bowls. And again, you can't go back to the old bowl system - there's no reason for bowl comittees to go along with such a plan. You've got to just cut them out completely. Who cares if a buch of old fogeys in some smokey back room in pasadena don't get to put on their dumb game and skim a bunch of cash off the top that should be going to the schools?

As long as bowls are around, the committees driving them will form cartels. It can't be fixed, and honestly, it's not worth fixing. I definitely agree that the "old system" was better. But once these guys figured out they could "conspire" to control the post season, it was all over. The BCS doesn't have any incentive to improve - as long as it's "good enough" at picking teams, you'll watch, and you'll like it, because they'll have the good teams, even if the matchups don't quite make any sense.

The idea of bowls as a "traditional reward" for a good season is often trotted out by those pining for the old system, but it's a bogus argument when you realize that bowl selections are primarily driven by how many fans a team can bring to the game and get to watch on TV. In 2001, BYU, heading for a possible 13-0 season, got pre-emptively excluded from the BCS before they even finished their season - because they don't have a lot of travelling fans, and the fans they do have are "bad for local economies" since they don't drink and party. Luckily for the BCS, BYU lost their last game that year, so they got to save a little face. That same year, Nebraska failed to win not only their conference but also their DIVISION and STILL got into the national championship game. Further, that SAME YEAR, florida took an at-large BCS bid before the SEC championship game, which everyone expected Tennessee to win handily. But LSU won, leaving Tennessee with a citrus bowl bid, which paid about $10MM less than a BCS game. Some "reward" for beating florida that year. Also in 2001, North Texas got a bowl bid (an automatic one) even though they had a losing record, while Ole Miss had a rare 7-4 season and got "rewarded" by getting left out. Hawaii won NINE games, including wins over Fresno State and BYU (both very good that year) and also got left at home.

In 2003, LSU lost to half of the SEC west and went to the Cottom Bowl, while Arkansas, which had a better record AND beat LSU, got passed over and stuck in the Music City Bowl, mostly because there was a perception that Arkansas had gotten lucky and really wasn't that good (which may have turned out to be true). This cherry-picking of teams totally destroys the value of bowl games as rewards for teams that achieve. Oh, and don't forget that other gem of the 2003 bowl season, FSU vs. Miami... AGAIN!!!

The BCS has created all kinds of really awful problems with how bowls select teams, and not just in the big four games. When the BCS was formed, we started seeing all the second- and third-tier bowls signing tie-in deals with conferences. As a result of this, there was not, for example, a single SEC-Pac10 matchup in a bowl game in the past three years. I'm pretty sure there hasn't been one AT ALL since the inception of the BCS.

Despite all of this, I had been until very recently another of the "bring back the old system" guys. What convinced me that the entire bowl system needs to be scrapped was last year's introduction of the BCS championsip game. At first it sounded like they were adding the additional game as a mini playoff... not another bowl, another game, after the bowl games! Wow, they might actually be trying to fix things! Oh, no, it's just a fifth bowl game, without a name, and now you've got four bowl comitties running five games - the big four BCS bowl comittees just brilliantly figured out how to increase their revenues by 25% without bringing a fifth bowl comittee into the mix to share the extra loot. Brilliant, in an EVIL GENIUS sort of way. Does this help college football, though? No. There were already more BCS spots than there are top-notch teams each year.