by JM Van Horn

Created on: October 13, 2010

With the release of the BCS polls right around the corner, it felt like an opportune time to discuss the four different ways to improve college football without a playoff system.

Hold off on Ranking the Teams

While an early season ranking may help give college football fans bragging rights over their friends, they can be harmful to the teams themselves especially when you take the BCS into consideration.

For example, if a college football team is ranked out of the top 25 when the season starts, they have a long list of teams that they need to leapfrog in order to receive consideration for a top five finish.

It is a lot easier to drop in the college football polls than it is to move up through them.

Create a Balanced Reward System for the Bowl Games

Right now there is too much money tied up in the bowl games outside of the BCS series. As a result, college football fans often see schools with more national prominence receive invites to bowl games over more deserving teams.

The bowl games should be based on merit rather than how well the fan base of a particular school travels. The perfect example of this in action is Notre Dame, who is always a big draw at their bowl game based solely on the strength of their fans and not the performance of the team.

Reduce the Number of Bowl Games

At what point did the NCAA decide that a 6-5 team is worthy of playing in a bowl game? Bowl games have gone from being played on or after New Years’ Day to a few days before Christmas.

College football would be better served by reducing the overall number of bowl games that take place after the regular season. Not only would it increase the popularity of the remaining bowl games, but it would give more credence to the success they had in the regular season.

Reconfigure the Conferences

We have already seen the start of this new trend with the recent additions to the Big Ten and the talk of super conferences in college football.  Ideally we would have the smaller conferences were dissolved and merged into four or six different conferences.

So if a team like Boise State was in a conference with the teams from the Pac-10, they would have the chance to play more competitive opponents. This would result in a more even playing field when it came to schedule and coaches would lose their old standby argument that some teams do not play in a competitive conference. This move would also improve the quality of play across the nation.

In the end, the basic problem with college football centers around individuals who are more concerned about making an extra buck than promoting the sport. Until changes are made to even the playing field for all of the schools, like in college basketball, it is hard to say if we can ever name a true college football championship.

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