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8 Team D-1 Football Playoff Scenario
By Coach P | December 6, 2007
Ok…here’s my scenario for an 8 team playoff. The first question is…how do you pick the 8 teams. I say you use one of two methods. Either go with the BCS standings like they are now or, as I heard someone else propose, hire a panel of retired coaches whose job it is to watch film for a living and have them pick them just like it’s picked in basketball. If you actually pay them throughout the season, have them start their poll about half way through the season and use their final poll to pick them, you’ll come out with a better poll than you will with a bunch of writers and current coaches who just look at scores and never see some of the teams they are voting for play. Personally, I like the second option but for our purposes here I’ll use the BCS final standings.
Using a normal 8 team tournament format you’d have no. 1 playing no. 8 to get to the winner of no. 4 vs. no. 5. No. 3 plays no. 6 to get to the winner of no. 2 and no. 7. This year the playoff would look like this:
Ohio St. (1) vs. Kansas (8)
Georgia (5) vs. Oklahoma (4)
Va. Tech (3) vs. Missouri (6)
USC (7) vs. LSU (2)
Now..how do we tie the bowls in? The top tier bowls (Rose, Sugar, Fiesta, Orange) work on a rotating basis just like they do now. They would get the championship game, the semi finals and one of the 1st round games. So a team would go, over the course of 4 years, 1st round, semi, semi, championship. The team that had the first round game would get first choice of which 1st round game they wanted after the brackets were set. The other 3 1st round games would rotate between the second tier bowls (Capital One, Gator, Outback, Cotton). These four would rotate picks (1st pick, 2nd pick, 3rd pick, out of the playoffs) and the team who was in its “out of the playoffs” year would get first choice among the teams not in the playoffs.
This is the scenario I’ve come up with. You have a playoff and you make the top bowls a part of it. In the process, you make the bowls more important than they are now. If anybody has other suggestions I’d love to hear them. I’ll take most any scenario to get a playoff system implemented. The system now is just ridiculous. In its time, the bowl system worked. That doesn’t mean it will work forever. In its time the pony express was a great system, but with email and cell phones does anyone think the pony express would work well now. Times change. Unfortunately, the university presidents seem stuck in a pony express system.
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