[iggymcfly]

MyTurn keeps getting closer and closer every time I read one of his playoff proposals. There are still a couple flaws that make his idea inferior to my perfect system though.


1. You can't have teams play three playoff games in the month of January
At least not if you expect the fans to travel to all three, and for the BCS games to be as "special" as they are now. The only reasonable solution is to have quarterfinals at campus sites in between conference championship week and final exams. If you don't win your conference, you can't get a home game, so games like OSU/Michigan last year will still be important and it will cut down a little bit on the giant break currently existing between the end of the regular season and the late bowls.

Will this devalue the bowl system? Not if done properly. The key is while the Top 6 conference champs and Top 2 at-larges qualify for the playoffs, an extra at-large and an extra conference champ will be guaranteed a BCS berth. We'll have 5 BCS games of which 2 will be national semifinals (guaranteed ratings), 2 will be grudge matches between the last teams in that lost in the quarterfinals and the teams that thought they deserved their spot, and there will only be one matchup left coasting on name value that might be a little boring. Most importantly, if you have the national championship a week after the semis at the site of the #1 ranked team's bowl game, the travel will be much more reasonable than trying to coordinate 3 rounds of neutral-site playoffs over a 4 week span.


2. Automatic tie-ins are not the fairest way to give all 119 teams a shot at the title.
This is a much smaller issue and goes back into my last point, but I really think that just giving the Top 6 conference champs auto-berths instead of specific pre-determined conference champions is much fairer. If the BCS is too subjective to determine which teams deserve to be in, then make it more objective. Allow computer rankings to factor in margin of victory and weight them more heavily in the formula.

Still though, if Southern Miss goes 12-1 and wins the C-USA title and Miami goes 9-4 and wins the Big East, then who's to say that Miami deserves the berth more just because their conference was historically better. Just take the top 6 conference champs based on that season's performance, period. The champs from the "Big 6" conferences will take the berths most of the time anyway, and if they don't, it will be because they didn't deserve it. The lowest major-conference champ will usually at least be the 7th best champ which will still qualify them for a BCS game where they get to validate their season in a high-profile big money game against the team that got in over them.