A Compromise to Fix College Football

If you were giving a college calculus exam, would it make sense for the first question to be 1 + 1 = ______ ? Obviously not, students shouldn't need a warm-up ... or at least shouldn't get credit for a warm-up. Then, why did WVU feel like scheduling Western Michigan for the first game of the year? I'm not picking on the Mountaineers, the Kansas Jayhawks took it to an extreme by racking up 1/3 of the total points by feasting on Central Michigan, SE LA, Toledo and FIU!

So, the first item on my agenda is to rid college football of crappy non-conference games between David and Goliath. While App. State beating Michigan happens, so does OU throttling Utah State and North Texas. There aren't enough slots on the schedule to waste dates on meaningless contests. I would like to implement some sort of revenue sharing plan to adjust for teams not being able to offer themselves up as sacrificial lambs in order to get a big (relatively) pay day. I think the big schools will still be ok.

The 2nd order of business is to move conference games up in the schedule. The season should open with conference games. Those are the games that are set in stone ... you always have OU v. Texas, Michigan v. Ohio State, Florida v. Georgia, etc. The first 7 games for teams in the Big East will be against the other 7. The ACC, SEC, and Big 12 will spend 8 weeks playing their division and half of the other. The Pac-10 can take 9 weeks so everyone can play everyone else. And, the Big 10 can do whatever the heck they want to do. The ACC, SEC, and Big 12 can keep their championship games, the difference is that they will come before the end of the season, so the teams that aren't playing in those games can start their non-conference schedule during the championship weekend.

Why play conference games first? Putting them first serves to weed out contenders from pretenders. Nebraska was expected to contend for the Big 12 North lead ... how'd that work out? Florida wasn't quite as good as was expected and Miami, ND, Wisconsin and Michigan were all overrated, to varying degrees. At the end of conference play, you can create preliminary ranking for all the teams based on prior performance of conferences and the play of teams during conference play.

What happens in non-conference play? The remaining part of the regular season consists of match-ups arranged by some sort of selection committee. Based on the rankings at the end of conference play, the first round of games will be assigned. Scores will be processed and a second round will be spit out. So, essentially, it's a playoff during the regular season. The thing is, we're replacing crappy games with potential classics and one loss doesn't destroy you. After a total of 13 games (they currently play 12 and have a potential for 13 if you qualify for a conference title game), the regular season will end and rankings will determine the teams that will play in the national title game.

This system preserves the bowl games. We aren't adding a bunch of games. What we are doing is improving the ability of comparing across conferences and determining who actually is the best team in college football. No system is perfect, but this is WAY better than the current system, where it is actually bad to play in a good conference, as long as the conference is good enough.