Voice in the Wilderness

Bowdlerized Competitive Seance: What happens when college football takes the UN approach
December 5, 2004

Big time, Division I college football is about to get bogged down in another, multi-lateral quagmire. As of this writing, the champions of three of the BCS power conferences: USC, Oklahoma, and Auburn, are undefeated. This means that the national champion will once again be in doubt.

The Bowl "Championship" Series, the NCAA's method for determining the best Division I college football team, has enough bureaucratic turf-fighting, misaligned incentives, pre-emptive butt-covering, and self-centered manipulations to put the United Nations to shame.

Many others have exhaustively railed against the BCS, so I won't discuss it here. I'm more concerned with overthrowing this hideous apparatus and replacing it with a real championship series.

Here is my proposal:

• Have a 16 team play off bracket, using the current BCS bowl and mid-tier bowls as the play off games.
• End the current conference championship games. These games are a detriment to the conferences as they subject the champions to one more week of physical punishment than the non-championship game conferences. Plus, the best, BCS contenders from these conferences often find themselves getting upset in the championship game, costing the conference a big payday.
• Start the first round the first week of December, second round the second week, take a break on the third week for finals, hold the semi-finals on the fourth week of December, then the championship game the first weekend of January
• The current BCS games can rotate between the championship, two semi-final, and 1 quarter-final game each year
• The 6 power conferences can get automatic bids (though the Big East should not get an automatic bid!), plus 10 at large berths. This way, conferences that are truly exemplary have a chance to have 2, 3 or 4 teams in the playoffs and get more hands in the bowl money cookie jar
• The other bowls can remain as they are: a nice, end of season event for those 8-3, 7-4, and 6-5 teams to get another month of practice, a modest payout, and give their fans something to cheer about before the conference basketball seasons start in earnest
• There can also be a competition of sorts between the bowl games so up-and-coming bowls can have a shot at hosting a playoff game based on their quality of venue, quality of city, attendance, and ability to attract sponsorship

I have to run the numbers on the payouts of the top 15 bowl games and develop scenarios for how those payouts can be guaranteed to the schools of the power conferences. However, with a playoff, I suspect that fan interest and viewership with considerably increase, thus increasing the ad revenue available to buy off the university presidents - oppps I mean incentivize academic administrators to progress in their understanding of grid-iron comparisons in a competitive context. (Kofi Annan couldn't have said that better ;-) )