BCS Bowl Season: Good and Bad

Happy New Year's everybody!! 2010 is now here and hopefully it is a successful year for everybody. January 1st is not only significant for it being the first day of the new year, but it's also the start of the BCS bowl games in Div. 1 college football. This is the day every college football junkie looks forward too. The beautiful day starts of with the "Grandaddy of 'Em All", the Rose Bowl. Personally it is my favorite bowl because it looks like a beautiful sight. It allows a west coast Pac-10 school to showcase its ability on a national stage. Pasadena, California, is a wonderful city and a great tourist attraction. Bowl games are a reward for these young kids who work very hard throughout the year. Even if you aren't a national powerhouse you have an opportunity to end your season on a good note.

The BCS system isn't all happy happy joy joy for everyone though. It is a built in system to promote matchups between the major conferences. There are six BCS conferences that receive automatic bids to the BCS bowls. The conferences are: Pac-10, Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, ACC and Big East. The outright champions to these conferences play in the four regular BCS bowls. The remainding slots for the games are filled by at-large bids. Those are teams that didn't win their conference, but are ranked high in the BCS poll. Schools that come from a non-BCS conference are at a severe disadvantage to play in BCS bowl games. There have been talks to add two more schools to the list of BCS conferences but that probably won't happen because those schools don't make as much money. The biggest problem with the BCS is that computers are the ones that decide who plays in the BCS National Championship Game.
It's tought to climb up the polls if you received a low preseason ranking. This happend to Auburn in 2004 when they went undefeated. The highest they got in the polls was #3 because the teams ahead of them had "better" resumes. There is too much of a debate when it comes to who should play in the national title game.

My solution for this would be to make a 10-team playoff. The top 10 teams in the BCS poll should play for the national championship. The #1 and #2 should get a bye week while the remainding eight teams fight it out in the first round. The games could be played at a venue in the same region where the higher seed plays. Once it gets down to the semi-final round, they could play the games at one site(like how they do the Final Four in college basketball). The site can just rotate between the original BCS bowls: Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, Fiesta Bowl in Glendale, Arizona, Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, Louisiana and Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida. It would make for a very festive atmosphere. The championship game would then be played at which ever stadium is hosting the semi-final that year the following week. The only real issue with this plan is that it may extend the college football season in to the middle of January. My suggestion is to play the playoff games while the other "non-significant" bowls are being played. This would make the season end in early to middle January.

Like you, I love speaking in hypotheticals. For some reason I believe my playoff system will not be put in to place until we see two small schools in the BCS National Championship Game and it doesn't make as much money as usual. So for now all we can do is dream of the day that we'll get to see a playoff. Until then we will just have to live with the system we have. The first BCS bowl game starts in a little over an hour so it's not too late to make predicitions for the games. So here are mine.

Rose Bowl: Oregon over Ohio State
Sugar Bowl: Florida over Cincinnati
Fiesta Bowl: TCU over Boise State
Orange Bowl: Georgia Tech over Iowa
BCS National Championship Game: Alabama over Texas