How to Fix the BCS

Fix the BCS! We want a national champion. We also like the happy chaos of bowl games. We want playoffs to include every worthy team, and we want to avoid a long postseason. We also want every game to mean something.

I can do all that. We need to overlap the playoffs with the regular season.

Here's how it'll work. Around the end of October, when teams have played at least eight games, the playoff begins. Take the top 32 teams that have won at least half their games. By early December, those teams have played three playoff rounds, leaving four teams in contention for the national championship. Other teams and playoff losers continue their regular season (with some hasty rescheduling), trying to get into bowl games. By mid-December, the final four play their semifinals, perhaps in a pair of early bowls. In early January, the last bowl game crowns a worthy, hard-to dispute national champion while the bowl traditions continue to sort out final rankings and bragging rights.

This'd require minimal change from the way things are now (keeping the vested interests happy), yet it'd crown a champion.

Only in major college football, with bowl games, would this work, keeping what's distinctive while adding what other sports have.

Rather than a completely new postseason, the playoffs might give priority to previously scheduled games and to conference games and championships, but that'd be an optional detail to work out.