Fixing College Football: The Overview

Everyone hates the BCS. Few things this side of Hitler incur the kind of grief the BCS pulls in. Everyone wants a playoff. They think that's the best way to figure out who's the better team. Here's the problem, blindly instituting a single elimination playoff while leaving the fundamental flaws in the system will only make things worse.

These are the problems we face in college football.

1. Lack of strong central authority.
2. Holding too closely to the idealistic view of amateur sports.
3. Lack of standardized conferences.
4. Too much outside influence from the Polls.
5. The apartheid between BCS conferences, and the Mid Major Majority.
6. Lack of standardized scheduling
7. Funding disparities.

These are the fundamental problems that college football, and indeed most intercollegiate sports, have built themselves upon. That said, college sports are not completely without merit. There are certain things that can, and should be preserved.

They are...

1. Tradition
2. Rivalries
3. The concept of the student athlete
4. The Bowl Games
5. Integrity

Those five items are what separates intercollegiate sports from the professional ranks. They are what we need to keep in order to keep the identity of college football intact. Everything else needs to get stripped away, and replaced with a more competitive model.

In several future posts, I will go into great detail over how each step should be handled. This will be a dramatic overhaul, drawing ideas from the NFL, the NCAA, the BCS, the English Football League, and others. There is no way in hell everyone would agree to implement my system, at least not immediately, but I'm here to give you a taste of what football would be like, in a perfect world.