Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
My solution is more radical and therefor probably not realistic. Get rid of the bowl games all together other than the low end preChristmas ones. Have a 16 team play off. All Div IA conference champs get an automatic bid. Fuck Notre Dame let them join a conference. That leaves 4 at large teams. Take the 16 teams and seed them (either by poll or RPI ratings as in baskeball). Match #1 vs #16, #2 vs #15, etc. The highest seeded team gets home field advantage through each round of the playoff.I don't think you understand how much it costs to host a major college football game. Why would the Rose Bowl want to host a game where they lose a few million dollars, just so they can make it back on the bigger game? It would be self-defeating to go along with that, and this is why they don't.
I am not saying you don't have a good idea, or that I disagree with you, I am simply explaining why it doesn't happen. I once had a very similar idea, to use the lower-tier bowls as a playoff, and the four major bowls would serve as regional quarterfinals. From that, you would have four teams who would play to decide a national champion. The lower-tier bowls would certainly benefit from having a top-notch pairing, as opposed to the #2 CUSA team vs. the #2 Sun Belt team. The major bowls would have important significance again, and not just be for show.
But the problem then becomes the number of games played. These are college kids, not pros, they have exams to take, they have a life outside of football. The universities aren't going to pay for them to fly all over the country playing football games at the end of the season. It's really easy for us to sit back and say they should do this or that, but the complications and logistics are something we don't have to deal with and others would.
an alternative to that would be to give automatic bids to the Big 6 conference champs and have 10 at large teams with rules that a non Big 6 can get an automatic qualification if them meet certain criteria (win conference, x number of wins and x rating in the polls, and no special rules for Noter Dame.). This probably a bit more realistic and fair.
Imagine Alabama playing Texas for the national championship game in Tuscaloosa? Wouldn't that be something!
Or Boise State playing Cinderella and running the table by making it to the championship game?
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