Simply creating a college football playoff system would have been too easy for our alligatorSports staff. Sure, the NCAA brass doesn't seem to be able to work out a formula for determining a champion on the field of play, but that was the easy part of this whole process for us.
It only took a 10-hour car ride home from Lexington, Ky., for four of our football writers and one of our photographers to come up with a complete realignment for college football.
The criteria for grouping teams was easy: start with matchups we simplyhave to have every year (there was no way we were breaking up pre-existing conference rivalries and we even added some like moving FSU and Miami intothe same conference with Florida), account for regional proximity and break any ties with how we feel the competitive balanced would be.
We added some doormats (sorry Southern Miss, Hawaii and Tulane), but ultimately, we feel this system champions utilitarianism - the greatest good for the greatest number.
There are now seven 12-team BCS conferences (Southeastern, Pacific, Atlantic, Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay, Longhorn and Mid-American) each playing a conference championship game yielding an automatic bid into our eight-team playoff system.
The four nine-team, non-BCS conferences (Southern, Northern, Midwest and Southwest Athletic) will determine a champion during the regular-season slate and play a four-team playoff of the champions to earn the right to the last bid. Their schedules will be a game shorter than the BCS teams to account for the extra game in the additional four-team playoff.
Obviously the sponsors will be mad about our doing away with the major bowls, so we did our best to accommodate them as well.
Each of the four major bowl committees (Fiesta, Orange, Rose and Sugar) will have one of the first-round games every year, and they will be on a four-year rotation with the two seminfinal games, the national championship game and an off year.
Whichever bowl committee is left out (the Orange Bowl in our example in the pdf file above) will have first pick of their first round game for that year. (See mock playoff on the second page of the pdf file)
The following is an air-tight plan that surely would have been signed off on by President Barack Obama, had we asked for his approval.
Who said you can't please everyone?
