Bowled Over

The NCAA football season is almost over.

After almost four months of games to decide the best team in the country we are down to the final two, or is it final four? In the official BCS championship game, Alabama will take on Texas. We also have two undefeated teams in the Fiesta Bowl TCU and Boise State. So who gets the number one spot at the end of Bowl week - no doubt the winner of the Alabama vs. Texas. Deservedly so. They played the toughest schedules and proved over the course of the season that they are the two best teams and will get to play a game to decide the champion.

This is what everyone wants, this is what they got this year (and for the past number of years), but that doesn't stop people from complaining that the BCS is broken and why is football the only sport in the NCAA that doesn't have a tournament to decide a champion. The proponents of this say that it makes the regular season the most important in sports and they are right. Every game is do or die. One loss can make your season meaningless (ask Oregon when they lost to Boise St in the season opener).

Since football is one game that on any given Sunday (or Saturday in this case) where one team can beat another this does seem very odd, so to fix this problem, here is what the Sandwich Shoppe proposes;

All the conferences stay as they are with the exception of the Big 10 or Big East who accept Notre Dame, Navy and Army into the division. It would be weird for Notre Dame to join the Big 10 since they are already in the Big East for basketball and other sports, but it would be fun if they joined the Big 10 because there are some great rivalries (ND vs. Michigan, ND vs. Penn St.) and it would be great to see what the Big 10 logo would become.

So here we go. Each division plays an 8 game schedule. All games would be within there own division. This would unfortunately eliminate some great inter-conference rivalries, but so be it. After those 8 weeks, we will have champions of each conference. The conferences that have east and west or north and south would still crown champs on both sides. Those champions would make it into the Bowl Championship Series. 16 teams in total. The breakdown would be;

ACC - 2
SEC - 2
Big East
Big 10
Big 12 - 2
Conf USA - 2
Mid America - 2
Mountain West
PAC 10
Sun Belt
WAC

Now the polls only matter to rank the teams 1-16 for the tournament. Just because a team like TCU isn't ranked at the start of the season, doesn't mean they can't make the BCS and there ranking would still be high enough at the end of 8 weeks to get a good seeding in the tourney.

From here it is single elimination and we get to name all the playoff games so the sponsors are happy.

The first round games (8 in total) are played over two weekends, 4 each weekend. Imagine football at 11am, 2pm, 5pm and 8pm for two Saturdays in a row!

Then you have 8 teams remaining (4 games) can again play over two weekends, followed by the final four played on the same Saturday and then the finals being whenever the BCS wanted.

These would be huge ratings generators and alot of fun to watch. Plus it would spread out over 6 weeks, making the season - 14 weeks about what it is now.

Over at Deadspintoday they linked to this playoff predictor for 2009.

Here is how my system would have played out;
#1 Alabama
#16 Temple

#8 Ohio State
#9 Georgia Tech

#5 Florida
#12 Central Michigan

#4 TCU
#13 Troy

#6 Boise State
#11 Houston

#3 Cincinnati
#14 Clemson

#10 Nebraska
#7 Oregon

#15 East Carolina
#2 Texas


In the end, for me, I think Florida plays Texas in the finals. Tebow doesn't lose twice to Alabama and then beats Texas in the finals to cap his unbelievable college career.