the playoff that i want and that the nation needs

OK, I said I'd hold off on this til October or so, but I have this problem keeping my flap shut, which is why this blog is here in the first place, really. This is my playoff idea, and yes, I realize everyone and their aunt and their aunt's gerbil has an idea. Which is why I expect a lot of very disappointed football fans when they do get around to making a playoff. Lot of folks going, "This isn't what I signed up for."

The reason for that is because most people don't take into account any of the realities of the situation, they just toss ideas out there that they think would be pretty cool. Hell, even the President of the United States is guilty of this. This idea of mine strives to take into account all the realities of the situation (or at least, the ones I know of) as well as keep folks like me happy. Folks who still like the bowls and still like the regular season with a little drama to it instead of having teams yawn through the end of the season because their ticket is punched for the playoffs.

Keep in mind, now, the Two Truisms I put forth earlier. 1, a playoff will be big (that is, four, six, or eight teams = nonsense) and 2, a playoff will be played primarily on home-field sites. That in mind, here is what I propose:

- The playoff should be sixteen teams.

Look. You can get the sorry notion of a six or eight team playoff out of your head right this instant. Here's why: autobids, duh. Once you institute a playoff like that, it will suck up 90% of the dollars invested in the college football postseason. TV contracts will be huge. Participants will get exposure aplenty. Dollars will fly everywhere. There is absolutely, positively no way a conference commissioner whose conference is already in snug with the BCS, bringing in all that dough, is going to agree to any system where in the future, his conference might be left out. Ever.

That means autobids. And once you have autobids, and you exclude somebody, we-he-hell, Mark Shurtleff will be on line 1, stat. The prospects for an antitrust case as it stands now are shaky at best. Nobody is "left out" of the championship because nobody has any kind of automatic bid to it. Once you do autobid to the championship, you have to have everyone. It will never, ever fly otherwise.

That means 11 teams, minimum. If you just add one at-large, to make it 12, you have solved absolutely nothing. If adding one at-large could solve anything, they'd have a three-team playoff and that would be that. Add five at-larges and you have the nice even number of sixteen.

Edit as of December 2, 2009:

OK, so while I was ensconced in yet another message board argument over playoffs, I found something that I think very, very few people realize. I certainly didn't. Dan Wetzel obviously doesn't, and he's one of the most venomous playoff proponents around. I don't think I've ever seen anyone take this into account when they set up their special gumdrop rainbow playoff worlds. What is this revelation?

NCAA bylaws require that at least half of all playoff participants be at-large teams.

Here is a source. Not the only place I've seen it, either, once I knew to look for it.

In retrospect, this should have been obvious. Why else have a 65th team in March Madness? It's why they didn't just chop the at-large field by one. I'm sure the NCAA mentioned this when they announced this extra team, we just all failed to pay attention.

Now, what this means is this. First, the sixteen-team bracket I propose? Absolutely mandatory now. An eight-team bracket is totally out of the question. Totally. The BCS commissioners aren't stupid enough to risk that one year, there might be one of their teams left out of the bracket, and if you think there'd be an ACC team in an eight-team playoff this year, you're nutz. Autobids will continue to be a reality. And you can't have just four autobids, because once again, the BCS conference commissioners would sink that plan before it even heard there was such a thing as the light of day, let alone saw it.

Second.....well, scroll down to "the playoff should be decided by competition committee" for this part. And exit edit portion, for now.

Now, how to set up the bracket?

- The playoff should use the Big East system.

Check out how the Big East does it in basketball. It's a great idea. They're not the only conference to use an uneven bracket, but they're the biggest to do so. The 9-16 seeded teams play in the first round, advance to face the 5-8 seeded teams, and the winner of those games advance to play the 1-4 seeded teams. Two byes for the best teams.

This is a fantastic idea for football too. It keeps the regular season extremely valuable. You're playing for byes and you're playing for home field advantage all the way through. The best teams only have to win three times to win the title; the lower seeded teams must win five. It would put a stop to the specific playoff criticism I have; namely, that it's too easy for a lower-seeded team to get hot and play its way through, like, say, the Arizona Cardinals. It forces the lower seeded teams to play one more game than they'd have to in a standard bracket, and immensely rewards the higher seeded ones. And there are other advantages too.....

- The playoff should be played on home fields.

They do this in the lower divisions for a reason: because fans aren't going to travel four and five times to go see their teams. Especially not around the holidays when they're trying to make sure Santa doesn't pass their kids by. You want to fill the stadium, you put it close to where the fans are, and that's at home stadiums.

And here's the part that should appeal to the powers that be: Under a standard bracket, played at home fields, only eight teams would be guaranteed a home game. In the Big East system, twelve teams are guaranteed that extra week of sweet sweet revenue. Naturally, of course, there would be fierce and acrimonious discussions about how exactly all that money is split. No matter how you slice it though, spreading the wealth like that (or the pain-in-the-butt of having to host a home game that you get no real benefit from) is something the commissioners are going to prefer.

So the first three rounds would be at home fields - that's how they do it at the other levels too. And then, for maximum hype and maximum sponsorship dollars, a Football Final Four, bid on by cities in the same manner that they do for the basketball one.

- The playoff should be in December.

Or more specifically, the first three rounds should be in December. This is for a lot of very good reasons:

- First, the NCAA and the TV stations could market the everloving shit out of Thanksgiving weekend as the final weekend of the regular season. The regular season doesn't need to creep up into the first week of December like it does now. Make Thanksgiving weekend the weekend in which playoff berths are won and lost, and hold the selection show on Sunday evening the same way they do for basketball.

- Second, it's just too unwieldy otherwise. Extending this thing into mid-to-late January makes a mess of coaches' recruiting calendars and makes the whole damn season too bloody long.

- Third, it would mitigate the excuse that a team had too long a layoff for the championships. They play right away. Three weeks is the longest a team would go without playing, which is plenty long enough to rest up and practice and short enough to stay sharp.

- Fourth, and most importantly so sit up and pay attention: The losers can be invited to bowl games. I don't want to lose the bowls so this, to me, is a really elegant and simple way to work this out. It's one of the things at the heart and soul of this whole idea. Because the first three rounds would wrap up by mid-December, there's plenty of time for the twelve losers to make travel plans for a bowl two weeks later. The bowls are a terrific reward for a good season. You go somewhere warm (usually), you have a good time, get a free schwag bag, and your fans make a trip out of it. It's a system too good to lose. Some of the sponsorship dollars would dry up and the smaller, weaker bowls might get picked off, but if we lose the New Mexico Bowl I'm not gonna lose any sleep over it. 20-25 bowls could still be played, and going to the playoffs doesn't have to mean you don't get to participate. The only teams who don't play in bowls would be the Football Final Four, who would play after the bowl games wrap up. It'd be a bowl-like atmosphere anyway.

- The playoff field should be decided by competition committee.

It works great for basketball.

Edit as of December 2, 2009:

So with the bylaws thing, a slightly revised way is needed to set up the field. Can't just autobid a team from each of the 11 conferences. Max autobids are eight. Fortunately, I have just the thing. Basketball uses an RPI - football can certainly set one up too. There are bright minds like Jeff Sagarin who do just such a thing. You can get conference power rankings out of this too. So, very simply, autobid the eight conference champions from the conferences with the eight highest RPIs. It doesn't matter to me what the criteria are for selecting the eight highest. This year only? Over the last two or three or ten years? Doesn't matter.

Then, create an at-large pool. The three conference champs that don't get autobids are automatically entered into the at-large pool, along with ten or twelve or however many of the remaining highest-ranked teams from the newly-created RPI, that the committee must choose from. This would give these conference champions a little bit of a boost, and cause the committee to think things like, "hey, Houston actually looks more deserving than BYU or Oregon State this year." You could further help the mid-majors that missed out on autobids by stipulating that no conference can have more than two teams in the playoff. This isn't an idea I'm married to, just a suggestion, but it is some food for thought.

Alright, so what of it? Arguments against it? I have some, and I have rebuttals too:

- Final exams? Are these student athletes ever going to be students?

I'm about as worried over this as the NCAA is, which scheduled JMU to play in the I-AA playoffs on December 12, which happened to be the last day of JMU's final exams: Dec. 8-12. They already do this and it's fine. I've never liked this particular anti-playoff argument.

- It's too hard to work the travel arrangements.

Nonsense - basketball teams have a week to figure out how they're getting to Dayton or Greensboro or wherever they find out they're going on Selection Sunday and they do it just fine. The same goes here. And, I envision that many of these teams will have their bowl invite nailed down before actually being eliminated. Bowls and teams will probably know in advance who's going where and have plenty of time for contingencies should a team not be eliminated as planned. Bowls could easily plan to invite the loser of a particular playoff game. Or, they might be, say, the Liberty Bowl and keep their contract with C-USA to take the conference champion, anticipating their elimination - or if that team makes the Football Final Four, plan to invite the team they beat.

- The Rose, Orange, and Sugar Bowls would all be very likely to not get the conference champion they're used to.

True. As a Big Ten fan, the loss of the traditional matchup in the Rose Bowl would be annoying. But less annoying than listening to all these asshole pundits whine about not having a playoff. And the matchups would still be great.

- The season could be as long as seventeen games.

Yes, but highly unlikely. That'd mean a 9-16 seed winning its way to the title game. Chances are excellent the longest season would be fifteen games, and only for two teams. This system actually improves the too-many-games situation by offering up byes and trying to ensure the lower-seeded teams are eliminated before playing too many games.

- This crams up the regular season and doesn't allow any rest afterwards.

Not even true. Most regular seasons are long enough for two bye weeks. Nothing would change here. A lot of teams, Big Ten specifically, finish up the weekend before Thanksgiving and thus would get an off week before the playoffs.

So, to sum up:

- Sixteen teams.
- Big East bracket.
- First three rounds in December at home fields.
- Losers invited to bowls.
- Football Final Four played in neutral city after bowl season.
- Competition committee determines the participants.
- Autobids go to the champions of the eight highest-ranked conferences.

It's brilliant.

Now, keep in mind, my proposing this doesn't mean I actually want a playoff, because I'm not going to kid myself they'll do things my way when the time comes. And I like things more or less the way they are; the BCS needs a serious reworking (for which I have ideas but have not self-vetted them yet for workability) but that doesn't mean I think it can't be fixed. But I think a playoff is coming. And when it does, this is the one I'd want to see.