Playoff within college system possible

By Doug Roberson

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Gary Danielson, college football analyst for CBS Sports, has long been a critic of the BCS.

He doesn’t understand the computer formulas. He doesn’t like the subjective voting. He doesn’t like that the title-making process is limited to two teams.

However, he’s not just a critic. He has a playoff plan that he says reinforces the value of winning conferences and preserves the traditional bowl structure.

In his words, here’s how he would crown college football’s national champion:

“Set up a small playoff that keeps the good parts of college football — polls, opinion, regular season’s integrity — and that has a fairness to teams that win their conference championship or that are stuck in a conference with another great team. It’s possible to have the two best teams coming from the same conference. That’s important to say.

“We are into that right now with LSU and Alabama. But it is fair for LSU and Alabama because they played within the rules and they deserve it. The rules should be changed, though.

“I have long advocated a six-team playoff. Here’s why. You need to have room for at-large teams. This year, that would be Alabama. But you also need to create a desire and value to winning your conference championship.

“You can’t go into the last week and have all of these conference championships being neutered. For my argument, you can’t have a better year than this year.

“This is my argument: Two teams would get a bye to play in the final four of college football. However, to be eligible for those two byes, you would have to win your conference championship.

“A committee [such as the basketball tournament committee] would go into a room and select the two most deserving teams to get a bye. This year it would be LSU and Oklahoma State, supposing both of them win on Saturday.

“Now the committee would decide four more participants from conference champions or at-large teams. There can be no more than two at-large teams.

“This year it might be from Alabama, Wisconsin, Virginia Tech and Oregon or Stanford.

“Those four teams would play on the weekend of Army-Navy [Dec. 10]. It would be an elimination game.

“The two teams that lose would still get to go to bowl games. The remaining teams would go on and play in the Final Four. The highest seed would play lowest seed. No. 2 would play No. 3. I believe there’s a lot of value in the words ‘Final Four.’ The games can be at a bowl game like the Orange Bowl or Fiesta Bowl.”

As far as criticisms, “Most people will say the NCAA won’t let teams play three extra games. In this system, it’s possible two teams could play three extra games.

“But there’s more integrity in creating the value of the regular season doing it my way.

“I think the TV networks would be into this 100 percent. It would give great value to the regular season. I put great value in winning your conference championship. It should matter that LSU [could] win the SEC championship.”