It is a few days after Ohio State ran all over Oregon in the first ever College Football Playoff National Title Game winning it 42-20. The CFP committee had its criticism especially the final rankings when Ohio State leap frogged over Baylor and TCU for the right to play #1 Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. Some fans were fine with the selection, most were very critical including ESPN College Football analyst and Ohio State public enemy #1 Mark May being the most vocal guy to speak against the choice. In this article I’ll talk about my almost perfect College Football Playoff expansion and do my best to explain why.
- The CFP committee and the NCAA need to expand the playoff to 16 teams, run it similar to the FCS except you eliminate the 1st round bye week for higher seeds.
- Each team plays 11 games a season. 12 if a team qualified for their conference championship. FBS Independents and Group of 5 conferences are always at large and have lower chances at qualifying for the playoffs. If a Group of 5 team for ex. Notre Dame or Cincinnati are in the top 5, a conference champion with a lower record, sos, and performance, their seed will be dropped in favor of Notre Dame or Cincinnati. Sometimes a conference champion will burst a lower ranks bubble by upsetting the higher ranked team in the conference title game and replacing a team in a bubble seed which would be seeds 12-16. The Big XII doesn’t have a championship game and if two teams are tied for 1st place, the team who won the head to head match up gets the automatic bid.
- Higher seeded teams host 1st and 2nd round games. Power 5 conference champions are guaranteed a spot regardless of rank. 11 at large bids reflecting the final week’s rankings for ex from 2014: (Note: Some teams may have rematches from conference rivals and regardless if played a week before.
1.Alabama vs 16.Missouri, 2.Oregon vs 15.Arizona State, 3.Florida State vs 14.UCLA, 4.Ohio State vs 13.Georgia, 5.Baylor vs. 12.Georgia Tech, 6.TCU vs 11.Kansas State, 7.Miss.State vs 10.Arizona, 8. Michigan State vs.Ole Miss
- BCS bowls ( Sugar Bowl, Rose Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Orange Bowl) including the Peach Bowl, and Cotton Bowl with the possibility of adding the Citrus Bowl in the future (my idea), will rotate hosting the National Semi Finals and National Title games. for ex.
- Every Tuesday after week 6, the committee will choose what team will be seeded up until the final week to determine if a team meets the criteria and where a team is seeded at.
National Semi Final Hosts for 2015-16 will be the Goodyear Cotton Bowl and the Capital One Orange Bowl. The Vizio Fiesta Bowl would host National Title Game, similar to how the BCS did it before going to the BCS National Championship Game (07-13) instead of being the generic CFP brand all over the field which we saw in Arlington on Monday. (Never liked the idea of having the CFP logo’s plastered all over the field during the National Title Game). The National Title Game would be The College Football National Championship Game at The Vizio Fiesta Bowl.
- The Playoffs would start 2 weeks after Conference Championship Weekend on December 18th and 19th.(4 games played on each day.)
- All games would be broadcast on ESPN’s networks including ABC.
This isn’t the perfect solution, but it will give more teams a chance to earn a right to play for a national title and see who really is the best team in the nation. This solution could even be watered down to an 8 team expansion whenever the committee does decide to expand in the future and should give college football fans the playoff that they’ve wanted all along as it has shown in the lower divisions that a large playoff format would work. Also to note, this is all opinion and idea on how to fix and expand the playoff format in the future. Hopefully this gives you the reader a good idea what we can expect in the future. But currently we still have to deal with the 4 team format.
