A Solution for the BCS Mess

Want a solution for the mess that is the Bowl Championship Series?

Try this: Keep it.

Call it whatever you'd like, but call me if you want a real solution to this piece of garbage that began in 1998 and has, incredibly, worsened nearly every college football season since then. The point of the BCS is to pair the two best teams in all of college football and bring them together in one unforgettable evening to determine the national champion.

More times than not, though, the system has given us very forgettable results.

There's little doubt a national playoff is the only reasonable way to crown a true champion. The problem comes in when traditionalists insists on keeping the bowl-game format.

Good news, folks. We can do both.

Once the contracts between current bowl games and conferences run their course, open a bidding war the likes we have never seen. Using the 2007 bowl season as our example, we have 32 bowl games whose committees would be free to submit a sealed bid to the NCAA. Then, we set up a 16-team format using the final regular-season rankings from the USA Today coaches poll. Thus, we're able to seed the 16 teams, coming up with the most balanced field possible.

The exclusion of 16 teams means we'll need 15 games to complete a single-elimination, four-week tournament. The top bid from the bowl committees will get first pick on which tournament game it will host. In all likelihood, that would be the championship game. The committees with the next two highest bids would host the semifinal games; the four next highest would host the quarterfinal games; and the eight next highest would host the first-round games.

And where, exactly, does that leave the other 17 bowls and their committees? They would be exactly where they were, except with a better pool of teams from which to choose. Remember, we're only using 16 teams in our tournament format, which is going to take up 15 bowl games. Everyone gets to keep their parade, pageant and halftime shows just as they normally would.

The other 17 bowls, though, which we would likely consider minor bowls, now get to select from 25 percent more teams than they can currently choose. That would eliminate 14 schools from bowl games - the number drops to 50 from the current 64 - but that solves another problem: Eliminating teams that might have finished 6-6 and sixth in their conference from being rewarded with a postseason trip.

Who might fight this idea the hardest? Athletic administrators and head coaches, of course. It's nearly a given now that if coaches can't lead their team to a bowl game, he'd be smart to start seeking employment elsewhere.

As a side effect, we're able to eliminate the 40-day wait for a national championship ... like the one we sat through at the end of the 2006 season.