By the time the Cotton Bowl came around Jan. 7 I didn’t care about the game.
Why?
Perhaps I was just too excited for the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl matchup between Nevada and Boston College, which at the time was a mere two nights away (oh, the excitement).
Maybe I was worn down from an exciting GoDaddy.com Bowl matchup the night before between Middle Tennessee State and The U(niversity of Miami-Ohio).
The more likely reason is that I just got bowled out. That, and the game was played later than when the national championship game is historically played (typically within the first few days of January).
This year, there were 35 bowl games. That means 70 of the 120 teams in Division I were playing in the postseason. Talk about handing out ribbons.
Great news, though, to those who love seeing empty stadium matchups between the lower-tier conferences — there will be even more bowls next year.
Eventually, every team will be in a bowl game, and the national championship will be played somewhere around March 15. Yet the major argument of the “cartel” (the term authors of the book “Death to the BCS” use to describe the brains behind the BCS) for no playoff system is that it would interfere with school.
Yes, of course, but doesn’t college basketball’s March Madness take the kids out of school for four weeks?
Anyway, that’s their argument, and they are sticking to it. So why, then, is the national championship played on Jan. 11? Both Oregon (Jan. 3) and Auburn (Jan. 10) had already started their spring semesters.
Playing a championship game nearly 40 days after the end of the regular season is just insane.
But it’s not going to change anytime soon because the cartel will not let it change. So fans have to move away from trying to get the eight or 16 team playoff they want because it isn’t going to happen. This cartel is more stubborn than a mule.
However, there’s still a way to get the playoffs we college football fans deserve so that college FBS (formerly known as Division I) can be taken off the list of NCAA sports that don’t hand out an actual national championship (other sports on that list: none).
Here’s my solution: Keep everything the way it is, but start the BCS matchups in mid-December.
Then use the current BCS games as the playoffs (minus the national championship). No seeding necessary. Just use whatever matchups are already there.
You can do this one of two ways. Either the top eight BCS teams in the rankings go, or the winners of the major conferences go and the remaining go to the highest remaining ranked BCS teams.
In this manner, at least one of either TCU, Boise State, Utah and whoever else will have a shot at a title should they be good enough. Then the other schools that actually deserve a shot get one.
The winner of the four BCS games (Rose, Fiesta, Sugar and Orange) play one another on a random draw. Names pulled out of a hat. They can make it a show on ESPN and make more money off the whole thing.
Then the national championship game will be played based on the winner of those two “national semifinals.”
Everyone wins, and the BCS makes more money. You can rotate out one stadium every four years to make it even.
I don’t know if this has been proposed before, but in all of the reading I’ve done, it hasn’t. So I’m sticking with this.
It’s better than what we have right now.
Andy Schwehm is a 21-year-old English and psychology senior from New Orleans. You can follow him on
Twitter @TDR_ASchwehm.
 
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Contact Andy Schwehm at [email protected]