"Fixing" college football -- let's see your solution

[Clarkmeister]

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Best regular season of any sport. Every game counts,

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unless you are Utah (2004) then none of the games count.

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Or Auburn.

The current system is such a joke because the tiebreaker, which is the polls, is set before a freaking game is played. USC gets in over any other one-loss team simply because they started the year at #1. See Oklahoma, Nebraska and Miami for examples of this. No polls should be released until like the 2nd week of October and the coaches poll should be abolished.

[ThaSaltCracka]

human polls shouldn't be a part of it at all.

[Aces McGee]

I think we'd be better off accepting that college football isn't set up to crown a national champion (its governing body, as far as I know, does not recognize a champion like it does in, say, basketball), go back to the old bowl system, and let the dozens of organizations that want to declare their own national champions (and there are a lot) do so.

-McGee

[ArcticKnight]

Just think how close we came to having Michigan play Ohio in the National title game last year. As is happened, Florida blew out Ohio state.

The flaw that worried me is that it came really close to the world not knowing how strong Florida was relative to Michigan.

I am in favour of a 1 plays 4 and 2 plays 3 in bowls games, with the BCS title game to follow that. Not perfect, but considering last year (and other years), we need it.

And for the team that is ranked 5 and thinks they should be 4, too bad. Can't fix everything.

[pvn]

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Best regular season of any sport. Every game counts,

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unless you are Utah (2004) then none of the games count.

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Or Auburn.

The current system is such a joke because the tiebreaker, which is the polls, is set before a freaking game is played. USC gets in over any other one-loss team simply because they started the year at #1. See Oklahoma, Nebraska and Miami for examples of this. No polls should be released until like the 2nd week of October and the coaches poll should be abolished.

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See Texas and Wisconsin this year!

The problem is, there's no way to make "early" polls "illegal". Even if the AP voluntarily decided to wait until October before publishing, there will be SOMEONE putting out a poll, and there will be retarded bozos using those as crutches. The people filling these ballots out are not geniuses. The people in this thread almost assuredly know more about college football than probably half of the voters.

The solution is to make the polls meaningless. Settle it on the field.

[rafiki]

I don't know US College Football super well. but I agree the current system is mediocre. My understanding is that too much money is associated to the bowls to ditch them. So maybe do both ?

The break before the bowls is too long as it is. Maybe when the regular season ends, hold your playoff. Determine your national champion. Then when that is done, have your bowls and keep your tradition and $$$. So effectively you're making more money with more games.

[pvn]

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I don't know US College Football super well. but I agree the current system is mediocre. My understanding is that too much money is associated to the bowls to ditch them. So maybe do both ?

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This is a myth. There is a lot of money associated with bowls, sure. But there's even MORE money that would be associated with a playoff.

The people pushing this myth are primarily the bowl comittees, since they're desparate to hold on to their lucrative positions, and playoffs would basically make them meaningless. There are a few sycophants who see the bowl system as a good way to keep the bulk of the money flowing to the teams already at the top, locking out the lower-tier teams (for the most part). Right now, a team like Boise State has to have a perfect season to even be CONSIDERED for the big money, while nobody thinks twice about a 7-4 Florida State team getting in.

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The break before the bowls is too long as it is. Maybe when the regular season ends, hold your playoff. Determine your national champion. Then when that is done, have your bowls and keep your tradition and $$$. So effectively you're making more money with more games.

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Exactly. More games = more money.

[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.

[stormstarter28]

My far-from-perfect but simple solution:

Keep the ranking system the way it is.
Have an 8 team playoff (using a rotation of the BCS bowls)
where the top 8 ranked teams get in, but any undefeated team gets an automatic bid (so teams like Boise can't get snubbed).
Keep all the other bowls the way they are.

The major flaw with this might be that teams could schedule weak teams to try to go undefeated. Other than that, I think it's a decent system.

[MyTurn2Raise]

pvn,

schools out of the big 6 conferences knew the score going into the game. Most have moved up from lower, playoff divisions. Why would they do so if they get cheated so bad?


The truth is these schools 'steal' money from the real programs in basketball and want to do the same in football.
Sorry, you don't bring in tv audiences. Sorry, you don't have big alumni groups. Without that, you don't deserve big money.

It's bad enough that the bigger schools have to support them in basketball, please don't make them support their football where most voluntarily moved upto the upper echelon where the system was well known.