My College Football Tournament Plan

The first BCS poll was released this week, and the way the college football season has gone so far this year, it seems like we could be potentially be on a collision course of about 10 1-loss teams vying for the 2 spots in the national title game. The polls will be biased, people will complain, someone will get left out, and we’ll have the same old story all over again. Ryan already wrote a preemptive strike against this post 2 days ago, but I have a plan that I think will work and some counterpoints for Ryan…

My plan is pretty simple. Much like the NCAA basketball tournament, take all 11 division 1-A conference champions and 5 at-large teams to make a 16 team tournament. The 5 at large teams would be the top 5 teams in the BCS that did not win a conference championship. The seeding in the tournament would be the order they finished in the BCS, regardless of whether or not they won the conference title. This method only essentially allows the poll makers to choose 5 teams to play for the national title because the 11 conference champs are out of their control. There could be some complaints over the at large spots but the last team out would more than likely be a team that already lost to 1 or 2 of the teams that make the tournament.

Ryan addressed this format in his post, saying that including all conference champions would have anti-climatic games. In the first round, yes, there probably would be some, but the NCAA basketball tournament has plenty as well, and for that matter, who really cares? I’d like to see this tournament happen mostly for entertainment value alone. The college basketball tournament is one of the most entertaining events in sports because you can cheer on the underdogs in the first 2 rounds and then see some spectacular matchups in the later rounds. This is exactly what you would see in this tournament. While the #1 seed would get to throttle the MAC champion in the first round, they would then (for example if the favorites won below) have to beat the Pac-10, SEC, and Big East champs 3 weeks in a row to win the title. Also, speaking of the MAC champion, Ryan mentioned that the Motor City Bowl is their way of getting media attention each year. In my tournament, instead of facing the 7th place team in the Big Ten on ESPN2 sometime around Christmas, they would get to play against a national powerhouse that, if they were to win, would bring an unbelievable amount of attention to their little liberal arts school conference. And if they get blown out? It’s not really a big deal, because no one expects them to win anyways. The MAC gets plenty of chances during the regular season to beat crappy Big Ten teams, so what’s the point of letting them do it again?

I don’t want to get rid of the bowl system as it is today, and my no means would a tournament make the bowls obsolete. Why? Because all bowl games except for the BCS national championship game are completely meaningless already. A matchup between the 4th place ACC team and 5th place SEC team is meaningless. When Purdue had a magical season and went to the Rose Bowl 7 years ago, it was meaningless. The BCS system as it is today sets up a national title game and the winner of that 1 game is the national champion. All other games are just glorified exhibitions with only pride on the line. I don’t see any reason to get rid of these games with a tournament in place, because once again, they can be entertaining, and good for the players. These games could make nice weekday filler between the Saturday tournament games.

Speaking of logistics, I’m not even going to get into the academic argument, because it is absolutely ridiculous. Most big time college football players only take school seriously enough to remain academically eligible, and it works in basketball with a much more hectic schedule. This system wouldn’t add too many extra games either. All 16 of the teams that qualify would make it to a bowl, so only the 8 first round winners would play more games than usual, with just 4 teams playing 2 extra games, and 2 teams playing 3 extra. As for the games themselves, I would propose rotating the semi-finals and championship game between Pasadena, Miami, and Glendale each year and have a semi-home field advantage for the higher seeds in the first 2 rounds. I got into more details on this last year on Is It Sports? but I think it would be interesting for each conference to have a home “neutral” location to host the game to save on some travel for the teams most likely to advance deep into the tournament.

So if the season ended after this past week’s ranks, here is how the tournament would look. I guess we’ll see where South Florida stands next week after their loss tonight. I broke conference title and multiple division ties based on higher BCS rank for now, but by the end of the season we’ll have clear cut conference champs.

ACC: Boston College (3)
Big 12: Oklahoma (5)
Big East: South Florida (2)
Big Ten: Ohio State (1)
C-USA: Tulsa (NR)
MAC: Central Michigan (NR)
Mountain West: BYU (NR)
PAC-10: Arizona State (8)
SEC: LSU (4)
Sun Belt: Troy (NR)
WAC: Hawaii (18)

At Large Teams: South Carolina (6), Kentucky (7), West Virginia (9), Oregon (10), Virginia Tech (11)

First Round Matchups
#1 Ohio State vs. #16 Central Michigan
#8 Arizona State vs. #9 West Virginia
#4 LSU vs. #13 BYU
#5 Oklahoma vs. #12 Hawaii
#3 Boston College vs. #14 Troy
#6 South Carolina vs. #11 Virginia Tech
#7 Kentucky vs. #10 Oregon
#2 South Florida vs. #15 Tulsa