No

by Bradley Dedon

Created on: April 12, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

Ab-so-lutely NOT!

For starters, without the fans, college football would seize to exist. A large part of a university's revenue is generated through a school's football program. At the FBS level, formerly known as Division I, this holds true to each BCS-affiliated school. Another thing is, it's never going to happen. There are too many fans out there that schedule vacation time from work around the schedule of their favorite school. Boycotting college football, for any period of time, would have a potentially harmful effect on the sport.

I am no fan of Mack Brown, nor Texas for that matter, but his suggestion a couple of years ago was perhaps the best solution I have heard: The schools involved in Division I (FBS) college football should break away from the NCAA. There is no binding clause between the schools and the NCAA that says without affiliation to the NCAA, there can be no competition. If there were, it would only be through contract, and at that point, once the contract expires, the coaches, athletic directors, and school administrators would have to build a proposal to reconcile over conflicting interests. Upon no agreement, the schools would break away from the NCAA and form their own organization. The American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) is a rather powerful, very tightly-knit group of coaches from around the world. Although it is not a union, enough support can be generated through their efforts to make this happen.

The BCS ranking system itself is not all that bad to begin with. It is fairly accurate, although, each season leaves one or two teams on the outside looking in. Surely each team that is right there near the top by the season's end has a case, and more often than not, their reasoning for why they should be in the championship game, as opposed to another school, is valid. We live in an imperfect world. We cannot always expect perfect results. Every system has its flaws. I see the BCS ranking system as a good thing for the game.

The BCS system has been gracious enough to place my beloved LSU Tigers in the National Championship Game twice in the past five years. Both times, the Tigers have come out victorious. I've taken off the purple-and-gold-colored glasses for a minute... I have a solution.

Utilizing the BCS ranking system as a means to hand out seedings for the playoffs is a great idea, in my opinion. Let's see what everyone thinks about this proposal:

-Force each team to play a mandatory 10-game schedule.
-All conferences will have a conference championship game. (Face it, they're not going anywhere. There is way too much money tied up in these events.)
-The conference champions each receive an automatic berth into a 32-team playoff format. This reduces the number of complaints from the mid-major schools.
-The top 8 BCS schools are the host sites for round one contests (2 games per location)
-The rounds of 16 and 8 are played on neutral sites.
-Finally, the semifinals and championship game will be played at the same site, and the site will be determined by the same method of which the BCS National Championship game is each season. Rotate between New Orleans, Tempe, Pasadena, and Miami, possibly throwing in a fifth location in the future. I say a possible fifth because the Cowboys' new stadium will certainly be a favorable location once the Cotton Bowl is moved there.

There. Simple, right? The teams ranked 33rd, 34th, 35th, etc... have no reason to complain. If this format is too much, scale it down to 16 teams. I see 32 teams as being more than fair, and quite honestly, the best possible solution. It can be set up to where teams begin the season a week earlier and there is an off period between final exams and the tournament. NFL teams play 16-game regular season schedules. With this proposal, a maximum of 16 games will be played by only two teams. This shouldn't hurt recruiting efforts much, being that there are dead periods where the coaches cannot contact recruits. This idea is a brief description, and like any other idea out there, it needs fine tuning before it can be finalized.

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