The Playoff of Postseasons

While watching Florida's thrashing of Ohio State in the national title game, I'm reminded of the endless criticism of the BCS system. The consensus is that college football's system for determining its champion is flawed because it unfairly excludes all but two teams from the possibility of a title. But missing from this debate is the larger question: what's the best way for any given sport to determine it's champion? There are three approaches you can take on this:

A) The system should be designed to give as many participants as possible a shot at the title.
B) The system should be designed to ensure that the current best team has the best chance of winning the title.
C) The system should be designed to ensure that the best regular-season team has the best chance of winning the title.

If you look at the current sporting landscape, most sports employ A, which is the "open" format. In pro tennis and most college sports including, most famously, college basketball, the champs are determined in a large single-elimination tournament with dozens of participants. The pluses are that there is the large possibility of an upset and that few fans and players feel excluded.

The most prominent example of option B is baseball. Typically, the World Series is won by the team that's hottest at the end of the season. You see an entire pitching staff catch fire while the opposing team watches their bats go dead despite having won 100 games during the season. You also see this phenomenon in hockey, where an 8-seed can ride a hot goalie all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals.

As for option C, the prime example from pro sports is the NBA. With its best-of-seven series, the pretenders fall by the wayside. The cream of the regular season easily rises to the top against the .500 teams who earned 7 and 8 seeds. The NBA playoffs are dreadfully long and offer few upsets, but at least the best team always wins the title. But the most extreme example of C is the English Premier League- there is no playoff and premiership title goes to the team with the most regular season points.

It's clear that college football has long embraced option C. It's fairly simple-- if you win all of your regular season games, all you need is a one-game playoff to win yourself a title. In fact, before the BCS was in place, the #1 team in the regular season didn't even need to prove itself against the #2 team (think BYU beating 6-5 Michigan to win the '84 title).

The groundswell of anti-BCS sentiment seems to want to move college football from option C to option A, given all the clamoring for an eight-team playoff. Such a system might reward a team like USC, which may be the best team in the country right now. But just because the Trojans are hot now, does that mean that they're more deserving of a title than a team like Ohio State, which accomplished more during the regular season? It really is a philosophical debate.

What college football needs is to look to it's big brother, the NFL. Pro football is the only playoff system that smartly takes from all three models. It's a single elimination tournament, it rewards regular season success (first-round byes and homefield advantage) and yet the hottest team can win the title (since you can win a Super Bowl with just three postseason games).

So taking what we've learned, we can set up college football's playoffs with three rounds, giving the top 2 seeds first-round byes. Then play the first two rounds with home-field advantage and a national title on a rotating neutral site. The best team would win the title, the fans would have an inclusive, exciting tournament and the regular season retains its importance. There, everybody happy now?