College Football Playoff

This is a work in progress, but I am working on a proposed College Football Playoff that college football desperately needs.

College Football Playoff

HIGHLIGHTS
•20 Team Playoff featuring 11 conference champions and 9 at-large berths
•5 weeks of play featuring bowl games if needed
•12 member committee to pick at-large teams, with one representative from each conference, and another representative for the independents
•Formula similar to RPI developed to be used for guidance. The current BCS format could be used with some minor tweaking possible.
•NCAA eliminates 12th regular season game to reduce number of games teams play. This brings it back to 11 games, the way it used to be.
•No rankings are distributed until week 6 of the season. No preseason rankings basically.
•Each conference will be required to have a conference title game to make it fair all around.

NUMBER OF TEAMS
•There are 11 conferences in college football. In accordance with NCAA rules, one representative from each member conference has an automatic bid. Therefore, every team can start the year believing they can win the National Championship.
•The 11 conferences are the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Conference USA, Mid-American Conference, Mountain West, Pac 10, SEC, Sun Belt, WAC
•Each team is seeded 1-20. Top 12 teams receive byes. The lower 8 seeds will play 4 games to complete the round of 16
•Teams re-seeded after the first round of games, no-seeding the rest of the playoff
•There is no maximum number of at-large selections that could be selected from a conference
•Notre Dame would have to be chosen as an at-large team since they are not in a conference.

SCHEDULE
•Games begin the week after conference title games end. This year, games would begin on December 12, 2009. 13-20, 14-19, 15-18, 16-17 seeds.
•Round of 16 games would be played the weekend of December 19 and December 20. the higher seed will host the game. As mentioned above, teams are re-seeded and 1 vs 16, 2 v 15, etc. no re-seeding after this.
•Quarterfinal games would be held January 3 and January 4. these could be your major bowl games.
•Semifinal and final games are open to interpretation. Obviously the NCAA will want to avoid going up against NFL Playoff games.
•Teams could be forced to play 16 or 17 games in a year to win a title and they already play 14 games now. This of course would be limited to about 4 teams so its not really that big of a deal.

MONEY
•Yeah, I know, money is gonna be a big factor. I haven’t quite figured all that out yet. Perhaps sponsor the round of 16 quarterfinals, semi-finals, and final in order for this to be complete

BENEFITS
•With a selection committee choosing the teams, there will not be as stiff of a penalty, or no penalty at all, should an at-large team lose one of its last couple games.
•Every team can start the year thinking they can win the National Championship. That does not happen right now.
•We really find out who #1 is.
•You can still have bowl games for teams who do not qualify for the playoffs.