Don't Talk About -- Playoffs?! You Kidding Me?! Playoffs?!

I'm sorry to inform the great Jim Mora, but we are indeed talking about the playoffs. Today college football fans finally received the news that millions of fans have been asking for since the Bowl Championship Series system was instituted for the 1998 season. Granted, at the time the system seemed like a logical solution to a system that had only seen the AP number one and two teams meet eight times in the previous fifty six seasons. Although people would finally get to the "top two" teams in the country meet for the national title, fans and football analysts alike saw that many issues could arise with the new system.

For the last thirteen years the computers and biased human voters have been deciding the national championship game, and maybe more importantly, snubbing other teams out of their bowl games. Fans, teams, coaches, and conference commissioners alike, have all seen the glaring hole in the current system and the need for reconstruction. Why not make a system that rivals the others created in every sport in the world? From every other college football division, to college basketball, to the NFL, MLB, NHL, and the NBA. The BCS has long argued that the reasoning was to protect the value of the regular season, but do they not see that they were asking top tier teams to schedule weak non-conference games to reach the BCS bowls? It has been a long, hard, and highly debated topic, but finally, we have a playoff!

Sixty five days before the start of the 2012 college football season the BCS Presidents Oversight Committee agreed to create a four team seeded playoff to determine college football's true champion. The new agreement is a 12-year deal that will begin in the 2014-2015 season and see six bowls rotate the two semifinal games each season. The six bowls involved in the rotation have not yet been announced and will not until further committee meetings are complete sometime in the future.The first national title game under the new system will be played on January 12, 2015, and will mark one of the most highly anticipated dates in sports history. With that anticipation will come a newly negotiated television contract and revenue sharing plan that has been rumored to be expected around the five billion dollar mark (yes you read that right... billion). 

The bowls and television contract are not the only two things that are left to be determined. The most interesting part of the new playoff deal that is to be determined is the selection committee for the four teams that will compete in the playoff. It has been announced that the committee will chose teams based on wins and losses, strength of schedule, head-to-head, and whether the team is a conference champion. The other part to be determined is who will comprise this committee; conference commissioners? former coaches? media? former athletic directors? This will be something very important to the make up and success of the new playoff system and definitely something to keep a close eye on.

All in all, this is a great day in the world of college football and something that will make a tremendous mark on the history of the game. I look forward to hearing from all my readers on what they think of the new system and their thoughts on how things would have been different in the past. 

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