Something completely unrelated to fantasy football

OK, so it involves football and it is a fantasy, but I wanted to share with you my thoughts about a college football playoff.

Right now, division II does a 24-team playoff, that began on November 15 and will conclude on December 13 (Minnesota-Duluth will be facing Northwest Missouri in the championship clash). A similar playoff format for the BCS division could start on December 13 and conclude on January 10 (2 days after the scheduled 2009 BCS championship game). So it is possible. This would require 23 games, so 23 of the 34 current bowls games could be included in the scheme. The top 8 teams get a first round bye, with the 9-24 ranked teams playing to get to the next round. After that, every team is re-seeded and sent to a bowl.

For the bowls that are included, I think that the revenues would skyrocket. Since the BCS has been instituted, I watch about 2 bowl games a year - the national championship game and the one that my team is in (if they make it - which is becoming rare). The rest of the bowl games don't really have any meaning. But if all the bowl games fed into the national championship, then you would have people across the country glued to their TVs on December Saturdays. All of these bowls suddenly become relevant.

Another advantage is that you no longer have the month-plus layoff for teams heading into the championship game. I believe that this layoff is what sometimes causes one of the teams to come out flat, making the game anticlimatic (USC vs. Texas a few years ago being a major exception).

And, of course, you don't have the problems of teams that are on the outside looking in that have a good reason to believe that they deserve to be in the championship game. Texas, USC, Utah, Boise State, and Penn State can all make arguments to be in the championship game this year.

So, we will use the BCS rankings that come out later today to seed our 24 teams, then pencil-sim the results of each Saturdays games until we get to our imaginary national championship. I will try to use the teams' actual bowl performance in my results, when possible.

Here are the games that we will have

December 13 - 8 games
Holiday Bowl #9 vs. #24
Sun Bowl #10 vs. #23
Motor City #11 vs. #22
Texas Bowl #12 vs. #21
Independance Bowl #13 vs. #20
Alamo Bowl #14 vs. #19
Emerald Bowl #15 vs. #18
Humanitarian Bowl #16 vs. #17

December 20 - 8 games
Gator Bowl #1 vs. #16
Outback Bowl #2 vs. #15
Motor City Bowl #3 vs. #14
Insight Bowl #4 vs. #13
GMAC Bowl #5 vs. #12
International Bowl #6 vs. #11
Capital One Bowl #7 vs. #10
Chick-fil-A Bowl #8 vs. #9

December 27 - 4 games
Orange Bowl #1 vs. #8
Sugar Bowl #2 vs. #7
Cotton Bowl #3 vs. #6
Liberty Bowl #4 vs. #5

January 3 - 2 games
Rose Bowl - #1 vs #4
Fiesta Bowl - #2 vs #3

January 10 - National Championship Game