alpo;1353355; said:
Forgive me if something like this has already been suggested.
To be really fair to all and still answer the financial concerns of the schools, AND to fit within the parameters of continuing education at the highest level,
How 'bout this:
Never happen, here's why: You still have 78 schools playing only a 10-game season. The ones that need the money most, the MAC teams and Sun Belt teams and C-USA teams of the world, are the ones most likely to get shut out of the process and thus play two fewer games. That'll cost them a million or two when they can't travel to the big schools and be paid $600,000 to be sacrificial lambs. Massive attrition from DI-A. I know: that's not necessarily a bad thing, but realistically you still have more than enough schools and conferences that would put a kibosh on that plan before it got off the ground. You've basically removed games from the schedule of all but a slim minority of teams.
Besides, who's going to fill a 100,000 seat stadium in the dead of December to see two teams play a game completely and totally devoid of meaning except to line the athletic department coffers? There's not even the pretense of padding your record or trying to get bowl eligible or play for a better bowl or anything. You've already accomplished everything you can possibly accomplish.
If you
really wanted to get revolutionary, this might be fun:
- Grab 8 more teams from DI-AA for a 128 team league.
- Schedule 4-6 games at the beginning of the season. Some of them would be conference games and others would be non-conference, scheduled by the AD as they are now.
- Have a competition committee seed a 128-team bracket during a nationwide bye week, based on last year's results and this year's first few games, taking into account strength of schedule, quality of wins, blah blah blah. You could set up an RPI same as in basketball.
- Play out the tournament. Losing teams return to their regular schedule as determined by the conferences and continue to play out the season. Winning teams continue through the bracket.
- Losing teams then continue to play the regular season just as they do now, but ineligible for the national title, and their conference title too if another team from their conference is still alive.
- The national title game then becomes the result of the bracket. All the bowls are played as they are now. Conference champions can be determined however the conference wants to determine them.
Advantages would be: We get a playoff and we don't ever have to hear the media whine and bitch about it ever again. The bowl system remains almost perfectly intact, and even retains its prestige. Being the Rose Bowl champs would still mean something. The BCS can continue, only without the national championship aspect - it's just a series of championship bowls for conference champions. The regular season still means something, because the playoff
is the regular season, and eliminated teams still get to play for a bowl game berth. Everybody gets a shot at being the national champion, and playing a seven-game tournament would probably shut everyone up about who does and doesn't deserve it.
Disadvantages: It'd required wicked amounts of schedule flexibility. The teams' logistics people would really have to earn their paycheck. (But the TV schedulers generally ensure that games don't have a set time until as soon as a week prior anyway.) And a team would be conference champs despite playing maybe as few as three conference games. (Although if you're national champs, you probably would have beat all the fools in your conference anyway.)
) with you about the bowl proximity to southern teams. That, IMO, is different from making teams that never play in the snow do so at bowl time. That would be an advantage far greater than a Big-10 team having to play a bowl game in Florida versus an SEC team type advantage.
