A modest proposal

Just as someone once said that everyone complains about the weather, but no-one does anything about it: the last stretch of the college football season is like a wet Wednesday in Glasgow, everyone's got something to complain about.

What chaps my ass about all of this BCS MNC business is the bleating about whether or not a team "deserves" to be in the BCS bowl picture... Deserves? A sport filled with statistics and metrics and god knows what, and we have this grade school business about "deserves"?

That doesn't cut it. I am sometimes tempted to say the hell with a playoff system, and just go back to the entirely subjective olden days of bowls -- rather like this impressive cri de couer as posted on EDSBS.com by someone rejoicing in the name Colonel Krunk (Whaaaaaaaat? Yeeeeeeeeeeahhhh!)

However, I think I want something a bit more definitive, therefore playoffs. But not an arbitrary 8 team format, where rankings come into it. And not a single-elimination approach (like European soccer association cups for instance) because part of the fabric of college football is the regional rivalries represented by the conferences.

I imagine that this has been suggested already, but what I would like to see is the top two teams from each of the BCS conferences plus a couple of others (to round out the numbers) get seeded based on strength of schedule, strongest against weakest and gradually meeting in the middle -- and then play single game elimination. The goal would be to maintain some shred of tradition while getting subjective aesthetic rankings out of the way.

Anyway, if you were to run this today, you'd end up with the following:

Based on today's data:

and hypothetically it could play out like this:
Is it obvious that Notre Dame would be forced to get into a conference to make this happen? Hope so, it's by (vindictive) design.

So what do you think? Just how full of shit am I? Answers are suggested in the poll below...