Please allow me to offer my solution to a Division 1A college football playoffs, a solution that I think you will all agree is really quite simple. Have one. Don’t worry about the tradition of the bowls. Don’t even think about the BCS. Simply have a playoff. The NCAA has the authority to say, “We’re going to hold an post-season tournament. We are going to recognize the winner as the NCAA Champion. We’re going to give them a nice trophy.” I have a pretty good idea of who that winner would have been last year … Boise State. Every year we here the same thing from the “mid-major” conferences in D-1A, the BCS is biased. It does not allow enough opportunity to non-BCS schools. Furthermore, every year college football fans are ignored for much of December. Every year the number of also-ran bowl games seems to increase and the locations become less appealing to team and fan alike. Who wants to go to Seattle in late December? Why do we put up with all of this when we it can be so easily solved? My proposal is this, at the end of every season when bowl bids are being passed out, the NCAA will also announce its selections for Division 1A football championship. Much like the NIT in college basketball is now, the NCAA Division 1A Football Tournament will not get the top teams. Those teams will continue to go to BCS and other high-dollar bowl games. That’s fine. The NCAA will easily fill eight spots with quality teams not selected by the major bowls. This is of course an adversarial relationship and undoubtedly the BCS conferences will agree that no BCS school will play in the NCAA Tournament. I’m sure Ole Miss would prefer to go to the Cotton Bowl anyway. Still, schools outside the BCS will jump at the chance to play for an NCAA Championship. Teams like Marshall and Hawaii could set that as a very realistic goal at the beginning of their respective seasons. Wouldn’t that be more of a motivation to the players than the prospect of spending Christmas in Detroit? If you went 10-1 in the regular season would you rather earn home field advantage throughout the playoffs or a trip to Shreveport for New Year’s Eve? Of course the playoff will also be great theater for the fans. Just think, what would you rather watch in mid December, the GMAC Bowl, or first round NCAA tournament action? Do you think TCU and Boise State would prefer to play in the Fort Worth Bowl, or the National Semifinal? What’s more exciting, a last-second field goal to win the Buy.com Bowl, or the NCAA Championship? I should admit that this plan is not simply a way to give more publicity to the much deserving and lesser-known programs in Division 1A. It’s also a sinister plot to undermine the BCS. You see, if the playoff is successful, then schools like Northern Illinois and Bowling Green will be less willing to jeopardize their records by taking a big paycheck to play a BCS program for homecoming, not if a bigger paycheck could be garnered from an NCAA bid. The BCS schools will therefore have a tougher time lining up non-BCS teams to pad their schedules. As these non-BCS schools become better known and more marketable, one of the TV networks will eventually sign a billion-dollar contract with the NCAA for the exclusive rights to broadcast the tournament. They will also ensure that the games are hyped and scheduled in such a way as to generate the largest possible audience and thus amount of revenue. Maybe one year an NCAA Championship game between two undefeated teams will get better TV ratings than the BCS Championship. Eventually, a BCS schools will break the alliance. They will announce that they are no longer going to play for a BCS Championship, but rather an NCAA Championship. That school may dominate the playoff for the first few years and therefore by constantly playing on national television in December, will grow their fan base, increase their television, ticket & merchandise revenue and sign the best recruits. The way I see it, the first school to make that jump would be a BCS school with a good football team, but also one with little hope to win the BCS Championship or even play in a BCS game. It would be a school that is very dedicated to their athletic program, a school that was accustomed to collecting NCAA Championships like sea shells on a California beach and a school that was anxious to find a source for more. Yeah, it would be Stanford. Before long, other schools will abandon the bowls. Baylor, Northwestern, Boston College, they will all make the jump. This will continue for a few years and then a whole conference will go. The playoff will be expanded to sixteen teams and the bowl schedule will diminish to a handful. Eventually the bowls will become the consolation prize for teams that couldn’t get into the NCAA Tournament. Isn’t that what they should have been all along?