Most college football fans long for a playoff. They rightly recognize that any system that considers some teams outsiders and uses a ranking system corrupted by regional biases and coaching rivalries to set up its championship game is broken and can never be acceptably tweaked.
This week, the 11 commissioners of the conferences that make up the Football Bowl Subdivision and Notre Dame's athletic director met in Dallas to talk about possible changes to the Bowl Championship Series ? the much-reviled BCS. They're scheduled to gather again in March and April to further kick around various postseason proposals.
Negotiations for a new television contract are scheduled to begin this fall. Any decisions about the BCS and a playoff system have to be made by then.
It is time ? at long last ? for a college football playoff.
College football champions at levels below the Football Bowl Subdivision are crowned by winning playoff games. The existence of these playoff tournaments challenges the various arguments used against a major college football playoff: A playoff would add too many games to the season; players would miss class time leading up to and during finals; a playoff would hurt the sanctity of the regular season.
Ah, yes, the sanctity of college football's regular season. It's the top argument against a playoff, as though a regular season would have no bearing on whether a team makes a playoff or how it's seeded in a tournament.
The regular season is considered holy and inviolable ? that is, until the BCS decides, as it did this past season, that Alabama, a team that didn't win its division much less its conference, deserved to play for the national championship.
Apparently, the BCS can't bow before a playoff, but it can bow before the vaunted Southeastern Conference.
Most proposals for a college football playoff include some version of an eight-team or four-team tournament. More limited proposals favor an extra championship game to be played after the bowl games.
Austinites and college football fans Don Craven and John Jackson have created a proposal they call Preferred Elimination that takes advantage of the existing BCS rankings system and bowl games to create a post-bowl championship game that pits the two remaining highest-seeded teams against each other.
Ideally, college football teams at the FBS level would play a multiteam, multigame tournament the way college football at the lower levels does. But major college football is a victim of its bowl games.
The oldest bowl games began decades ago as holiday exhibition games and evolved as the desire to name a national champion increased.
We're stuck with them; any playoff system has to include and work around the bowl games.
It is true that some sports have diluted the value of their regular seasons ? not because they have playoffs, but because they have expanded their playoffs to include more teams (and to increase fan interest and make more money).
The casual observer might wonder how bad a team has to be to miss college basketball's NCAA tournament next month or the NBA's playoffs because so many teams are allowed in.
By expanding its postseason, major league baseball has hurt the purity of its regular season.
Playoffs are not perfect. The best team doesn't always win. Upsets happen. Then again, maybe an upset is how we discover that one team's relatively unimpressive regular-season record left it underrated, while another team's regular-season record left it overrated.
Whatever the assumed merits of whichever teams make it to a playoff championship game, fans accept the game's outcome.
Merit becomes the matter of a final score not a matter of the perceptions of writers, coaches and computer programmers.
A playoff is a legitimate way to crown a champion. The BCS is not.
It's time to give fans what they want and college football what it deserves ? a playoff.
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