Which BCS/Playoff System Would Have Worked Best

With the recent announcement of an official 4-team seeded playoff that will begin in 2014 and run for 12 years, I thought it would be a great day to take a step back in time and analyze which would have been the best system (BCS, 4-Team, 8-Team or 16-Team playoff) in the BCS Era (1998-2011).

In the first two years of the BCS, I thought that the best team in the country for that year (Ohio St ’98 and Nebraska ’99) did not get a chance to play in the national title game. This prompted me to come up with a solution to include all deserving teams of a chance at taking home the title. My proposed system was to include four teams and seed them #1 vs #4 and #2 vs #3. The semi-finals would include the current bowls with those games being played on January 1st and the national championship game would be played at a later date.

Naturally the main reason I chose just four teams and not eight or 16 was to preserve what I think without question is the best regular season in all of sport! You cannot give me a single plausible argument as to why teams with two or more losses should be given a chance to play for a national title. I think you will find in most years there are three teams that are fighting for those top two spots and as long as you include those teams, I don’t think it really matters as to who is the #4 or #5 team as long as the true deserving teams are in the field.

Below is the complete chart of every year from 1998-2011 with a breakdown of how the teams were ranked heading into the bowl games and what each playoff format would have looked like. I used the AP Poll rankings and not the final BCS Rankings because we are heading into a direction where a selection committee will pick the teams and will be much more subjective (like the AP Poll) than a computer ranking. Make sure you are checking out my May 30 Blog which includes what I wrote in this year’s magazine about a Determining a National Championship and also my June 27 Blog which included my original 4-Team playoff argument from 2000.

http://philsteele.com/Blogs/2012/July12/DBJuly17.html