5 changes that would drastically improve college football
A better playoff format
We have 10 college football conferences at the FBS level and I am of the opinion that if you win your conference championship, you should be a playoff team, so in this 32-team model, there will be automatic berths for conference champions (decided by tiebreakers).
Every FBS college football team should control its destiny at the start of the season. But in Group of Five leagues, winning every game often isn’t enough to even get a playoff opportunity.
Can you name another sport where you can win every game or your schedule and not even get a chance to play for the championship? Seriously, what’s the point?
Give Group of Five teams automatic access to an extended playoff or move them down to the FCS.
Going to a 32-team model would also give these schools a chance to potentially host a game. Ideally, the college football playoff bracket would be split into four regions of eight teams, similar to what’s done with the NCAA basketball tournament.
Yet, the first two rounds should be played on home fields. Teams should get rewarded for having strong seasons and having the chance to host the first two rounds will do that. So instead of Georgia playing a meaningless FCS opponent in November and an SEC championship game, it could host two playoff games instead.
It would be a win for college football fans (all of them), as well as a win for TV and the gates at college stadiums which would host actual playoff games for the first time ever.
The “regional championships” or quarterfinals could be played at neutral sites, 10-14 days after the round of 16, and they could be rotated between the current New Year’s Six games.
The Rose Bowl can keep its place as a semifinal game, which will be on New Year’s Day. The Fiesta, Orange, Sugar, Cotton, and Peach Bowls can rotate as quarterfinals and the other semifinal, so every year those games are hosting a playoff matchup, which they aren’t now.
You can pick out a Saturday in mid-December which is usually the first weekend of bowl games and have four quarterfinal playoff matchups. What a day of college football that would be.
The semifinals follow on Jan. 1 as discussed with the national championship game around Jan.10 just as it is now. This would just allow things to be truly settled on the field for the first time ever in college football and it would be fascinating to watch.