Some people like the current 4-team playoff. Others want to expand to 8 teams. But I have an idea for a 20-team playoff that will crown the undeniable champion of college football.
To start, we’re going to assign every FBS team to one of ten conferences, and then divide each of these conferences into two divisions. These will be based loosely on geography, but mostly on money. Most of these conferences will have a number as a part of their name, which must be at least plus-or-minus two from the number of teams in said conference.
Each season, every team will play 12 games. We want to make things fair for the richest teams, as traveling to away games will be much more expensive for them given their exquisite tastes, so we’ll let them play seven or eight of their games at home.
At the end of this 12 game season, we will create two playoff brackets. The first is the Consolation Bracket, which is comprised of the ten division winners from the small-money conferences. In the “Round of 10”, each team will match up against the other division winner from their conference. Now that the bracket has been whittled down to 5 teams, the Consolation playoffs are over. Congratulations to the five “Consolation Co-Champions”
The other bracket is made up of the ten division winners from the big-money conferences. The first round, we’ll call it “Championship Week”, matches up each of these ten division winners against the other division winner from their conference. The five winning teams from the “Championship Week” round move on to the “Sweet Six”.
The “Sweet Six” isn’t played on the field, however. This system is too progressive for that. Instead, we’re going to let the executives at ESPN pick four of these teams to advance to the “Semifinals”. Oh, and we forgot to mention, the reason this is called the “Sweet Six” is because Alabama is guaranteed automatic entry to this round to help round out the field. Also, if the folks at ESPN think that any of these six teams won’t bring in enough money, they can substitute in any other team they like.
Before we move on to the final rounds, we’ll take a few weeks off for the holidays and allow ESPN to schedule a bunch of exhibitions for any teams that won more games than they lost. Yay.
Now we enter the “Semifinal” round. And I’ll be honest, I’ve run out of ideas to make these playoffs even more awesome. So, the rest of the playoff will play out just like any other vanilla 4-team tournament. We want to settle this on the field, after all.
