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The Path to the Playoff System

As any reasonably avid sports fan knows, deciding the NCAA College Football Champion each season is an unprecedented and hopefully unrepeated blend of incredible fan interest and incompetent decision-making. We will likely never see a full-blown playoff system, but the system is creeping along towards a best case goal of a "plus one" system in which a winner is determined from four teams, with an outside chance of eventually expanding to an eight team tournament.

Before disposing of all of the purported reasons for not having a playoff system, the only reason that we do not have such a system is because NCAA College Presidents do not want one. Not because they are concerned about academics, scheduling or any of the other excuses typically foisted upon the fans; rather because of the most fundamental reason of all: money. College Presidents by nature are risk-averse. Under the present system, each school in a given conference earns money when a member school participates in a bowl game, while the schools that actually participate earn even more. To break the logjam, the network powers and sponsors that be will have to produce a ten or eleven-figure package ($10,000,000,000 or so) to make it worth the Presidents' while to move away from the bowl and, by default, BCS system, that is, to guarantee each of them similar funds in the new system.

All lesser divisions (II and III) in College Football, where academics are clearly of greater importance, have a several week playoff system; meanwhile, the most popular event in college sports - March Madness - freely allows its student athletes to participate in up to four weeks of season-ending tournaments - conference and the Big Dance, so academics is not the over-riding concern in Division I College Football. The games themselves could also be scheduled such that the bulk of tournament play would be at or near the seasonal holidays, at a time when classes are generally not in session.

The BCS system, as it stands, is all but broken, as we have seen with three or four teams in most seasons having legitimate claim to the BCS Championship game, at times excluding a major conference undefeated team, such as what happened to Auburn of the SEC a few seasons ago, while other teams advance based on a matrix of mostly computer-driven criteria.

The lobbying for the "Plus One" system where the final championship game would be played one week later between the winners of the top two bowl games arguably featuring the top four teams in the country could be achieved by the 2010 or 2011 season; there are still conferences, such as the Big 10 and Pacific 10 that are resisting even the present system. This is especially interesting as these two conferences do not have conference championship games, allowing them to finish their schedule and slide into BCS Championship games by doing nothing, such as what allowed Ohio State to be throttled by LSU in the title game.

To have the system work correctly, namely to decide a championship "on the field," it will have to move to eight teams as there will always be a 5th or 6th rated team that will wrongfully be excluded from a shot at the title, while there will rarely, if ever, be a 9th or 10th place team that will have a legitimate such claim.

Whether or not we see that day will depend on how much money the sponsors and networks can arrange for the colleges, not on how many weeks of "class time" is required to do the playoff system the right way.

Learn more about this author, Pete Smits.
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