Fixing the College Football Playoff
- Ryan McCrary
- Dec 8, 2019
- 6 min read
You wake up on a random Tuesday in March and make a cup of coffee. You sit down on your couch and turn on ESPN before you head to work/school or before you do whatever you do during the week. “BREAKING NEWS” scrolls across the bottom line in big bold white letters followed by news that will change college football forever. The bottom line reads “The Wire’s Ryan McCrary has been hired to replace Mark Emmert as the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision Commissioner.” What does this mean exactly? This means that I now have control of Division 1 college football (in this fantasy of course) and can make any changes I feel are necessary.
I love college football and I spend every weekend sitting on my couch like a bum doing absolutely nothing productive as I watch Universities face off on the gridiron. However, I hate the college football playoff system and when I say I hate it I mean I despise the entire system. Let’s jump back into my fantasy world as I fix the college football playoff system.
The New Playoff System
Before I start, I’m not just fixing how we choose what teams make the playoffs or changing the number of teams that make the playoffs, I’m fixing all the problems with college football as a whole. My solutions fix divisions within conferences, the rankings system, and unbalanced schedules within college football. Let’s get started.
1. Notre Dame Joins A Conference
The first change I’d make as commissioner would be making Notre Dame join a conference. Since Notre Dame is independent, even though they play an ACC schedule, they don’t have a conference championship game meaning they play one less game than any other team that plays in their conference championship. There’s an easy solution for this; make Notre Dame join the ACC so they have a conference championship game if they make it that far. This fixes the chaos that ensues when the committee has to discuss whether to choose a Notre Dame team that didn’t play in a conference championship or a team that played in and maybe even won a conference championship.
2. Eliminate Divisions
Divisions are stupid in 2019 and I can’t believe we haven’t done away with them already. In conferences with 12-14 teams, some teams go years without playing alleged conference rivals. Also, there’s an unbalance between divisions in the SEC and the ACC (when Florida State and Louisville don’t suck) where one division is much better than the other. A solution to this would be a pod system. Here’s an article explaining the pod system for each conference.
At the end of the regular season the #1 and #2 teams in each conference face off in their conference championship, giving us the best conference title games possible. If there happens to be a scenario where two or more teams are tied for 2nd in a certain conference, use that conferences’ tiebreaker rules to decide who finishes #2 and gets to play in the conference championship.
This system fixes the unbalance between divisions, rivalry games taking place irregularly, and it gives us the best conference championship games possible. It’d be nice if every team could have the same structure as the Big 12, but that’s impossible unless we have major realignment where some teams get demoted to the group of five (I actually wouldn’t mind this, but I wanted to keep my fantasy somewhat realistic).
4. Change How Teams are Ranked in the CFP Rankings
Right now the college football playoff rankings are constructed by a 13 member committee consisting of former coaches, players, presidents, and even a professor at Arizona State. Some of the people on the committee have active ties to great programs like Oregon and Florida. Why are we letting people who have active ties to universities decide who makes it into the playoff? That’s idiotic and I don’t understand why there are only 13 variables when deciding the college football playoff.
I believe the college football playoff rankings should be decided by an advanced BCS system. In our new ranking system, we take rankings from a committee, computers, and the coaches polls to create the CFP rankings.
To start off the ranking process we get top 25 rankings from three sources:
1. The updated 13 person committee (no member can have active ties to a university) for the human element.
2. A computer-based poll that ranks teams based on several factors including strength of schedule, strength of record, margin of victory, quality wins, and head to head results and results between similar opponents.
3. Coaches Poll
Next, we take the average of these rankings and there we have the College Football Playoff Rankings.
3. Expand The Playoff
In our current system, I don’t think expanding the playoff is 100% necessary because every year we have just two or three teams who are legitimate championship quality teams. Even with just a four-team playoff, we’re arguing between flawed resumes for the fourth spot. I’m REALLY against expanding the playoff to eight teams (without first round byes or play-in games) because then we’re allowing teams with disgusting resumes to make the playoff and compete for a national championship. I don’t want to see a 2 loss Penn State, who didn’t even make their conference championship game, be given a playoff spot and have an opportunity to win a national championship. If you want to make the playoffs you have to earn it and you don’t earn it by losing to two of the best teams you played that season. I know I just spent the last 132 words crapping on the idea of expanding the playoff but in my fantasy, I do want to expand the playoff to 6 teams because it could work out extremely well. I think it’s incredibly stupid that we have a four-team playoff when we have FIVE major conferences. The math just doesn’t add up here. In our expanded playoff I want to maintain the meaningfulness of regular season and the importance of non-conference schedules while also making the conference championships matter even more.
In my system, conference champions get automatic bids (the conference champs will be ranked based on our new ranking system) and two teams get at-large bids. The two teams with at-large bids have a play-in-game and the winner moves on and joins the five conference champions. From this point, the #1 and #2 seeds have byes while the #3 seed plays the #6 seed (play-in-game winner) and the #4 and #5 seed play each other. After this round, the #1 seed plays the lowest remaining seed and the #2 seed plays the highest remaining seed. The winner of those two match ups will face off for the National Championship. I’ll try to make it more simple.
1. Conference Champion
2. Conference Champion
3. Conference Champion
4. Conference Champion
5. Conference Champion
6. At-large Bid
7. At-large Bid
The conference champions are guaranteed a top-five spot and the order of these teams will be decided by our new ranking system. The same goes for the teams with at-large bids.
Play-in-Game:
Quarterfinal:
#1 - First Round Bye
#2 - First Round Bye
Semifinal:
#1 vs. Lowest remaining seed
#2 vs. Highest remaining seed
National Championship:
See how easy that was? Due to multiple factors (11 conferences, unbalanced schedules, and bias towards name worthy schools like Alabama, Ohio State, and literally anybody at the top of the SEC) it’s impossible to come up with a playoff system that rewards teams who earned a playoff spot and is inclusive to everyone in the FBS (Division 1-A). I believe my system is solid, even with any issues you think it may have, and does a good job of rewarding teams for winning conference championships while also giving teams a chance to get in if they played well enough to be considered for the playoff but slipped up along the way and didn’t win their conference championship. My system also rewards playing difficult schedules and gives group of five teams a chance to make the playoff if they earn it (UCF would’ve gotten an at-large-bid in 2017 under my system). Inevitably we’ll have an eight-team playoff in a few years, but I really think this a very good college football playoff system.
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