BCS Drama Part 3,927 - Playoff Ideas

[venture]

A lot of debate on the match ups this year and of course when it comes to NIU getting into the Orange Bowl. I feel for these kids being used as the tool to beat up the BCS system, which is going away...somewhat. Not to mention a 5-loss Wisconsin getting in as well I still think we will find ourselves asking for a more extensive playoff system because 4 teams is still a joke.

The argument is that it extends the season to long to go to a larger playoff, yet every other division of the NCAA football world does it. So ignoring that point, I feel a 16-team playoff makes the most sense. So let's look at what a 16-team playoff might look like.

1) All FBS conference champions get an automatic bid. So after this year we'll have ACC, Big East, Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, MAC, Sun Belt, MWC, CUSA and PAC 12 left playing football with the WAC dead. So that is 10 of 16.

2a) Utilize the existing BCS computer rankings (without Human Polls) to fill in the seeds for the remaining 6 spots.

2b) Utilize a committee to select teams for the remaining 7 spots.

3) Everyone is seeded based on their combined BCS rankings.

The 2nd part is going to cause some issues undoubtedly. So should teams be required to have at least won their division in the conference or be ranked 2nd or 3rd in their conference? Perhaps that just needs to be completely disregarded. For now I'm going to say go by the rankings. If you want it, play better. So let's play it out on this year...

Layout is just like most other playoffs.

Conference champs (combined rank): Alabama (2), Kansas State (5), Stanford (6), Northern Illinois (15), Florida State (12), Louisville (21), Wisconsin (26), Boise State (19), Tulsa (33) and Arkansas St (37).

Next 7 spots to be filled by computer only average: Notre Dame (1), Florida (3), Oregon (4), LSU (8), Oklahoma (11), South Carolina (10).

Seed	Round 1
1	Notre Dame
16	Arkansas State
3	Florida
14	Wisconsin
5	Kansas State
12	Boise State
7	LSU
10	Florida State
8	South Carolina
9	Oklahoma
6	Stanford
11	Northern Illinois
4	Oregon
13	Boise State
15	Tulsa
2	Alabama

The big thing to notice is here that Georgia gets left out in this case. They are #7 overall in the combined BCS score, but their computer rankings have then at 10.5. You could argue that the computers only penalize them more for losing another game unlike human voters that might be more biased to keep them ranked high. It might be interesting to just eliminate the human component all together, which would move things around again, but that can be discussed later.

This setup has a lot of match ups I would really like to see. The rest are all decent OOC games. Granted, ND/ARST isn't a real marquee game, but crazy things have happened. Seeing these matches up though, if you make it out alive there is no dispute on if you deserve the title.