The Solution for a college football playoff

November 27th, 2009 by Matt Ryan

Fantasy College Blitz welcomes back Matt Ryan after a long sabbatical (kid, job loss, kid, job found) and he comes back with a vengeance. Known to veterans of our site as the quantitative statistic leader of our writers up to 2007, Matt has always opposed the Bowl Championship Series and he created The Solution to bring the playoffs to the Bowl Subdivision, just like it exists at every other division of collegiate football. For your review (VM):

The BCS Crystal Trophy

The rules:

Nothing revolutionary – basically it’s a 24-team playoff, top 8 seeds get home field. To mitigate the cries of missing revenue for the big conferences , there are 8 ‘play-in’ games played @ the top 8 seeds home site (extra revenue for top seeds). After the playins, it is a 16-team bracket.

Top seeds are given to 6 automatic qualifying (AQ) conference champs and 2 at-large spots given to highest of non-AQ conference champs or highest ranked divison champ (SEC, ACC, Big 12 only).

Who does the rankings? I don’t mind the BCS, but I would deemphasize coach’s votes, perhaps emphasize a Legends Channel that does this full-time.

Let’s apply this to 2009-10 – tough luck to Alabama (projected SEC loser) this season. TCU and Boise State accept the 2 atlarge bids to the Top 8. There will certainly be years where one or two division champs (SEC, ACC, Big-12 runnerup) will grab a home game. All conference champs get an auto bid, so Troy (Sun Belt) and Central Michigan (assuming they beat Temple/Ohio winner in the MAC Championship) bounces out Stanford and Miami (FL).

The existing bowls (other than the BCS, which are used as national quarter finals and up) are used with all those 6-win teams in a similar structure, like an invitational or an NIT tourney. Lesser bowls are arranged into tiers with the more prestigious (Cotton, Citrus, Gator, etc) getting higher rounds games. I will leave the politics of that to the big money players – my solution focuses on removing “mythical” from the college football national champion.

Below is a jpeg of how I would seed for 2009 ahead of the final two weekends. I imagine this will open a floodgate of comments…