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How To (Properly) Fix the College Football Playoffs

By Kipper @pghsportsforum
Hey guys, long time no talk. Nice to be back on the board... Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving! As you probably know by now, the top four were chosen to be in the first ever CFP. This did not come with criticism and controversy. With the first year under the belt, there's a few changes people wanted to see. I have been thinking of ways to tweak it since it was first announced. Eventually, some will be made. Here is my solution for this issue, which I think is a very realistic solution that everyone can be happy about.
Eventually, I see the power 5 conferences (ACC, SEC, B1G, XII, and PAC) seperating from the rest of the 1-A and creating their own, seperate sub-division (this is almost inevitable as P5 schools have criticized how easy it is to get into Division 1 now a days and have already been granted autonomy from NCAA): Division 1 CFP Football. Now I'm not going to discuss which, if any, teams would move to power 5 conferences (probably would be a select few from the American Conference, independence, or Mountain West) and become full-time members (I'm looking at you, Notre Dame) for this.
With this, as of now, you would have the 65 schools in P5 conferences apart of this. Teams that are left behind can merge with 1-AA FCS if you choose so. CFP teams could still play these teams for OOC games. You would play your traditional 12-game schedule with your byes but every conference would have a championship game now, elminating what some think is a problem in the Big 12. To decide a TRUE national champion, there would be an 8-team playoff. This would concist of your 5 undisputed conference champions along with 3 at-large spots given to the 3 highest-ranked teams that are not conference champions and would start 10-14 days following conference championship games. Each game site location leading up to the title game would be nice, neutral-site venues that could be bid on, making some money off of this. Each playoff game would be played on a Thursdasy (not sure), Friday, or Saturday and the title game would be played on a Monday (like it was in BCS). Similar to what they did in the BCS days, the CFP National Championship game venue would roatate among these listed bowls below (the bowl game at these sites would also take place if it's hosting the title game). There would be a 2-week break in between the Final Four and the title game. There would also be your 6 major bowl games (Rose, Fiesta, Cotton, Sugar, Peach, and Orange) that would take place and feature the highest ranked teams that didn't make it into the CFP Playoff. These games could take place on their tradidtional New Year's Eve/Day slots or during the 2-week layoff for the title game. There would be no other bowls besides these 6. If you don't make it into the playoffs or one of those bowl games, you're off to basketball season.
2 reasons why I chose 8 teams in playoff instead of 16. 1: The point of being in the playoff is that you can make a legitimate case for being the #1 team in the country. Once you get into the double digits and teens there are fewer, if any, teams that could make a case for being the best. 2: With 16 teams being in the playoffs, there's a good chance you would start to have teams that aren't even in the Top 25 (barely missing the cut) making into these bowls. Having 8 teams would be the best of both worlds, having an ideal amount of teams in the playoffs while have good, ranked teams playing in the major bowls.
With this, teams/conferences can still keep current TV deals (besides bowls that are going away, but ESPN would most likely get rights to playoffs so they wouldn't be too upset) and no legal action would have to be taken into effect (as of my knowledge). I'd love to see some feedback from what you guys think of this format, maybe even discuss what you guys had in mind. See yinz around!

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