NCAA Football

I am not a college basketball fan at all, but I love to watch their tournament.  It has always been fun for me to fill out a bracket (this year I made a $25 donation to Care Share India and I am competing against a group of about 25 other participants for the chance to win a nifty Flip cam--I think the bracket raised $2,000-$3,000 for Care Share so I feel good to be a part of that!)

I wouldn't get into something like this if there wasn't a fun tournament to watch.  Which brings me to college football--why don't they do this?

I am an NFL fan and I really only watch college football games to scout what is coming down the pike in the draft.  I hate the bowl game system, and the end of the season is way too subjective and tradition-laden for me.  The teams that won in the past already have the advantage in recruiting--rigging the system in their favor as well creates an unfair cycle of success that is no good for the game.

Here is my solution to the football problem


I have two main suggestions for improvement--objectify the rankings and play a tournament

To fix the rankings a bit here are 2 changes I'd make
1. the preseason ranking lists the top 25 based on a point system that very simply doles out points for your final ranking plus points for victories against last year's final top 25.

2. then to get this year's final rankings there are two things that matter
     -25 points for being ranked 1 at end of year, down to 1 point for being ranked 25
     -plus you get same points for a victory vs final weeks rankings (25 for beating final #1, 24 for beating final #2, etc)

Best of 16 tournament

Based on 1 and 2 above, the top 16 point totals make the tournament--here is how it would have worked out last year, 2009

Here is how the seeding would have worked in 2009 based on the above.

Just look at this mini bracket below for a second and tell me you don't think this would make for some kick-ass football.  Low seed gets the home game and to be the National Champion, all you have to do is win 4 games over the course of the month of December (you play each Saturday in December--maybe a two week delay for the championship game so it flows into January)

--Would guarantee best team is crowned champ.
--Would give the country 15 awesome and meaningful playoff games
--Would encourage better regular season matchups.  You'd still play a couple of tune ups against Appalachian State, but really coaches would be trying to guess which teams would be top 25 by year end and try to play a handful of them.

In time, the top 25 would be stronger than it is at present because the schedulers on the top teams would try harder to play each other more often.

I for one would love to see it.

..now back to my basketball bracket...already 7 losses on day 1 and 2 games left to finish!