College Football Post Season: A Sensible Plan

College football is my favorite sport. I love it. But if it were up to me, here’s how I would run it.

I would have two fundamental rules changes to start. First, spring football will now consist of a two game schedule. FBS schools may schedule FCS schools in these games. These games will be official games and will count on team’s records. But, in the fall, there will be no games allowed between FCS and FBS schools. No longer will teams get to bowl eligibility by beating a lower tier school to raise them to 6-6.

Second, there will be eight conference of 16 teams each playing in the FBS. Everyone else gets downgraded to the FCS. 96 schools will have a shot at one day winning the FBS National Championship. That is plenty. How many schools have a realistic shot st it anyway? Maybe 30 or 40?

These conferences would divide into two eight-team divisions. Each team will play the other seven teams in its own division, plus three team from the other division in it’s own conference. The other two games must be played against one of the other FBS conference’s teams. One of those must be a road game. Every team will get six home and six road games per season, no exceptions. It may mean moving the Florida vs Georgia game and the Oklahoma vs Texas game to the campuses. Tough.

At the end of the regular season, the division winners would play for their conference championships. This would in essence be the “Sweet Sixteen” of college football. The winners of those game would then meet in one of four designated “Quarterfinal Bowl Games”. These could the the Rose, Sugar, Orange and Cotton for example.

All other bowl game s must be played by December 31st. These four games can then be played the first few days of January. Perhaps two on the 1st and two on the 2nd, or three and one, whatever.

Those our winners would then move one to the semifinals a week later at neutral sites. Then the week before the Super Bowl could be the championship game, also at a neutral site.

Those who say “that’s too many games”, I say it’s only too many games for four teams. It’s only one extra game for two of those teams. In the spring, you can schedule a couple of lower division teams, so that way all your players can get in the games, but at least they’ll be actual games and not a glorified practice. And when the fall starts, there won’t be a scrimmage against one of these teams that your season ticket holders have to buy tickets and pay booster fees for. Major schools, such as Alabama, Texas, USC, Florida, etc still have their eight home dates. In fact, everybody in the FBS would have eight home dates. We can’t get much more fair than that.

And with roughly 30 more teams moving down to the FCS level, that championship playoff becomes all the more interesting. Fans may actually start to pay attention to the FCS. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

As far as the “lower tier” bowl game are concerned, think of some of the teams that would in them this year. 11-1 Florida, 11-1 Oregon, LSU, South Carolina, Georgia, and Oklahoma would all be in one. Well, maybe not Oklahoma. And with no FCS wins padding resumes, we can cut back on all these needless games. At 6-6 it would stand to reason that about 48 of 96 teams would qualify. So that’s enough for 24 bowl games instead of the 35 we have now. Can we not come up with 11 bowls we can live without? Sure we can.

Plus, we can finally get Notre Dame into a conference.

This is a win-win for all concerned. Now we just have to get some powerful people to agree with me.