That being said, are you in favor of a +1 or a bigger tourney?

I think the NFL playoffs are a superior product to the college postseason, though their regular season doesn’t even compare to college football’s.

However, the NFL playoffs only determine the Super Bowl champion. That should be distinguished from the “best team.” The 18-1 Patriots team, as much as I despised them and rooted against them in the Super Bowl, was a better team than a 14-6 Giants team. That isn’t just a hypothetical resume comparison. The Pats beat the Giants in the last game of the regular season.

Secondly, a college football playoff is not a reasonable proposition, however much we might enjoy it, until the number of eligible D-1A teams is reduced. The college football schedules are just too incomparable. NFL playoffs work because there are only 32 teams in the NFL, NFL teams play every team in their division twice, and their remaining 10 games are against (usually) equally talented competition.

I think the NFL playoffs are a superior product to the college postseason, though their regular season doesn’t even compare to college football’s.

However, the NFL playoffs only determine the Super Bowl champion. That should be distinguished from the “best team.” The 18-1 Patriots team, as much as I despised them and rooted against them in the Super Bowl, was a better team than a 14-6 Giants team. That isn’t just a hypothetical resume comparison. The Pats beat the Giants in the last game of the regular season.

Secondly, a college football playoff is not a reasonable proposition, however much we might enjoy it, until the number of eligible D-1A teams is reduced. The college football schedules are just too incomparable. NFL playoffs work because there are only 32 teams in the NFL, NFL teams play every team in their division twice, and their remaining 10 games are against (usually) equally talented competition.

Some of which will go away if Texas loses, but if Texas wins handily and Oklahoma wins handily, you have the possibility of

1. Oklahoma
2. Texas

That would be a BCS nightmare.

Hydro, you are arguing an extreme. No one is seriously arguing for a 32 team December madness poll with each team playing another 5 games to get to the ultimate level. Division I-AA, Division II and Division III don’t even go past 16-20 teams and 4 rounds, and their seasons start much earlier. While I don’t mind more games, we’ll just say that what these small schools do is impractical at large public/private institutions.

Also the NFL-NCAA analogy is faulty. There are 32 teams in the NFL and 120 in Division I. There are 12 playoff spots in the NFL and 10 BCS spots. Increasing the pool to the extreme cases of 16 or 32 would still leave the top college football teams at a disproportionate disadvantage to the leeway bad NFL teams can get from clinching early, so every game would still very much count.

A +1, maybe even an 8 team playoff would retain much of the urgency of the regular season; yes USC or Oklahoma could probably afford a hiccup and still very much be alive, but you’d still have to win your conference or at the very least be in contention at the end. In fact you could argue the better teams would be under more pressure to win their final games to preserve their playoff spots.

Just look at the boredom with which USC fans greeted their latest Rose Bowl berth and conquest. Take a look at the hideous BCS bowl matchups we’ve been treated with the past few seasons. And take a look at the clusterfuck that is approaching with Utah, USC, and perhaps Texas all laying claim to a piece of the national championship. Doesn’t sound like much excitement to me. Just discontent.

Note: I don’t know how much SOS counts in the BCS rankings.

Utah vs Alabama in Sarajevo. Mormons trying to convert Muslims. It could spark this.

This would probably increase the size of the season for some teams (15-17 games), but I don’t think there’d be a huge conflict with such an issue, especially if the homefield idea is implemented.

There is an issue with homefield though, which based on the climate could give cold weather teams who run the table a huge advantage over warm weather teams. Ohio State would have hosted a lot of their games in the muck of the December Horseshoe the past two seasons. There’s a reason the Big 10 ends their season two weeks early; they’re just unbearable conditions for football teams to play in outdoors. I don’t know how happy the SEC and Big 12 and USC would feel about such a proposition since they all have tougher conference schedules than the Big 10.

Would you eliminate conference championships for bigger conferences like Big 12/SEC/ACC since it gives them an advantage over smaller big conferences?

Even given the fact that I agree with pretty much everything you say in point #2, this system wouldn’t work for two reasons.

1. There is no way that you could guarantee the financial windfall that accrues to BCS conferences and teams from the current BCS system. Who would guarantee a $17 million payout per team for a Round of 16 or Quarterfinal game? Sure the championship game might offer a significantly larger payout, but if your conference places two or three teams and they’re all out in the first and second rounds, suddenly your football program can’t support the rest of the athletic department as is frequently the case, including, I believe, at Cal.

2. The NCAA does not own the bowls and does not even acknowledge the postseason, choosing to view it as an exhibition instead. To support a three or four round playoff you would need an organizing committee that owned the rights to play in the stadiums, had television contract negotiated, sponsorship, etc because the NCAA does not have that for football. This is not to mention that the early round playoff games would probably be more sparsely attended than even the ACC championship game. The quick fix to that problem is to allow the higher seeds literal home games – ah the magic of a December vacation trip to State College, PA – but then the hosting school has to negotiate a television contract, sponsorship, etc. and has to do it in the week leading up to the game.

I’m with you. Embrace the conference… ya know, the place where all the teams play each other and where an actual champion can be determined entirely on the field of play. The bowl games are exhibitions, nothing more, and having a bunch of rival conference champions duke it out makes for great sport. Even the current half-assed setup of assigning a single game as THE championship game diminishes the value of all of the rest of the product when contrasted with multiple (conference) champions slugging it out for super-regional bragging rights.

But I’d prefer to see the semifinals played in home stadiums, too, just like the NFL and the lower divisions of college football. And play the semifinals before the bowl season, which would free up all but the two finalists to go to a season-ending bowl. The bowls and a multi-round NCAA playoff that is completely independent of those bowls can coexist. Indeed, it’s really the same exact system that’s in place now, but rather than relying on polls and computers to place the teams, we have a post-season, on-the-field competition do it for us. What a concept.

I’d like to see crappy teams like Va Tech and Cincy completely disqualified, or at the very least not get an automatic home game. If they’re the bottom two teams in the BCS rankings then they should go on the road and try to win, even if they win their awful conferences.

There are a lot of bowl games now. Seems to have plenty of passion.

How would Utah schedule any better than Oregon State and Michigan? They did play Utah St., but that’s a rivalry game. It’s certainly better than Alabama, who only played one non-conference team (Clemson) with a pulse. Alabama only played one more bowl team than Utah did.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to say that Alabama has a better resume and deserves a spot over Utah, but it’s not because Utah scheduled a bunch of patsies. If Michigan had a typical Michigan year Utah would have had one of the strongest non-conference schedules in the country.

The bottom line is that I dislike any playoff system that leaves out an unbeaten team with a legit schedule for a 3 or 4 loss team from a “power conference.”

Again, the issue I have with trying to retain the bowl structure is will fans be willing to book their tickets to as many as three neutral sites over one month? It seems like you could have disappointing ticket sales and low turnout for several of these games, or maybe even depreciating value for the games as they go along because people can’t afford the massive travel costs of booking bowl tickets barely in advance of flight reservations.