According to legend, Hercules attempted to regain his position on Mount Olympus by redeeming himself from some past misdeed.  In accomplishing this Hercules successfully completed 12 outrageous tasks that proved his worthiness.  If fixing the mess that is the BCS had been on his list instead of merely slaying the 9-headed hydra, the ending might have been altogether different.  It’s fitting that if the original “Hurculean tasks” took 12 years to complete, that after 12 years of squabbling and complaining over the BCS format someone finally came up with the perfect solution.  Yes folks, read on as I untie the ultimate “Gordian knot” and provide the means to determine the Men’s Division 1A NCAA Football Champion.  First, let’s be clear on what the issues are that afflict the current system and have to be addressed moving forward.

Problem #1 – Playoff or no Playoff ?
Everyone agrees that playing some type of playoff format would result in a clear National Champion.  The problem however is that nobody is prepared to mess with the “third rail” of college football, the marquis Bowl games.  Having a single BCS Championship game is bad enough, but no one is prepared to go further to undermine the importance of the January classics, the Sugar, Orange, Fiesta and the “Granddaddy of them all”, the Rose Bowl.  Add to that the fact that tacking further weeks on to the end of the season is a non-starter as well.  Injuries, weather, conference play in college basketball and the specter of going head-to-head with the NFL playoffs all mean that an end-of-season playoff is not going to happen. Some have suggested having the playoff occur at the end of the conference season and prior to the Bowl games. As long as the NCAA continues with the pretense that these are “student-athletes” and pay lip-service to an academic component in the lives of their players, this can’t work either as exams fall right in that time-frame. So to recap, forget a playoff.  That is not the solution.

Problem #2 – Non BCS Undefeated Teams
The second major problem that has never been addressed by the BCS is the complaint from the non-BCS conferences that they are not being given any love.  This year, with undefeated teams like TCU and Boise State playing well and undefeated teams from power leagues like Florida and Alabama winning but not doing so convincingly, the problem is magnified and the murmuring that the National title game will not feature the two best teams is heating up.  Even teams from BCS Conferences that have run the table like Cincinnati and until this weekend Iowa create problems because questions remain about their strength of schedule.  Just how good is the Big East? How much stock do we put into wins over Connecticut and Rutgers? In the case of the non-BCS teams, their argument has been that they have no way of proving themselves to the voters because the power leagues won’t put them on their schedule.  Often, it’s too late that fans (and voters) realize just how good these teams are, as in 2007 when undefeated Boise State defeated Big-12 Champion Oklahoma in a classic tilt and last year when 12-0 Utah dismantled an Alabama team that had flirted with the #1 position all year.  As long as their in-season scheduling is entirely in the hands of the individual institution this situation will continue.  Oregon came into this season with realistic expectations of winning the Pac-10 and competing for a National title.  Those hopes were severely damaged in their first game of the season as they scheduled non-BCS Boise State and lost.  It didn’t do much for Boise State’s position in the polls as Oregon’s credentials were immediately questioned, but it effectively took Oregon out of any championship conversations.  Why would Florida or Alabama run the risk of such a scenario?  They are perfectly happy scheduling Troy or Charleston Southern knowing that their in-conference games will bump up their S.O.S. number to an acceptable level.

Solution

For his 5th task, Hercules had to literally deal with a lot of crap in coming up with a solution.  He was required to clean the Stables of Augean that housed tens of thousands of cattle and do it in a single day! I’ve heard of some dirty jobs before, but yikes! He accomplished this by the ingenious, if somewhat impractical idea, of diverting a couple of rivers to flow through the stables.  I mention this, not just as a visual to illustrate the mess that the current system is in, but to set up some seriously out-of-the-box thinking. To solve the current problems, the organizers of the BCS have to institute the…..(drum roll please)… “BCS ELIMINATION WEEKEND”.  Just what is the “BCS Elimination Weekend” you might ask?  It’s a spectacular set of non-conference games, organized and scheduled by the BCS at neutral sites in the middle of November that pits the top 16 teams in the BCS against one another. The purpose is to clarify the strengths of the various conferences and weed out the pretenders from the contenders.  It will help determine prior to the Bowls just which of the non-BCS conferences deserve to be mentioned as National title game contributors.  It would be a television ratings hit and generate a boatload of money for the conferences and all of the networks involved in college football.  It would ensure that the non-BCS teams are given a chance to play the power-conference teams without taking the scheduling completely out of the hands of the schools. Most of all, it would be a rip-snorting, all out battle-royale that would probably produce some of the most exciting football in years.

How It Would Work

A BCS Selection Committee would be formed and be modeled along the lines of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Committee, comprising representatives from all of the affected conferences.  Their job would be not just to match-up the teams by seed, but create games that would be of regional interest and provide the necessary information to produce the Bowl game pairings and ultimately the National Championship match-up at the end of the season. After the third BCS Poll comes out (this year November 1st), the match-ups would be announced and the top 16 teams in the standings would be paired together. The games would be played two weeks later over the course of three days from Thursday to Saturday.  Two games each on Thursday and Friday and four games on Saturday. If you win that weekend you continue to be considered for the Championship game, lose and you are eliminated from consideration.  Since no one would know prior to the season which 16 teams would be involved, no games could be pre-scheduled for that weekend.  The committee would therefore also match-up all remaining teams from the affected conference in a series of games played on home fields with those locations being balanced among the conferences and rotated yearly.  Going back to the top-16, based on the standings after Week 3 this year, some of those match-ups could have included Boise State (BCS #7) vs LSU (#9) giving the country an idea of how strong the WAC is and whether their win over Oregon was an early season aberration. Cincinnati (#5) vs Oregon (#8) pits the top teams in the Big East and the Pac-10.  What about a game between TCU and Texas played at the new Texas Stadium in front of 100,000 fans? The bottom line is that everybody wins with this solution and it takes the BCS organizers off the hook when it comes to the mid-majors.  It’s effectively a playoff but it doesn’t conflict with any of the obstacles to a post-season tournament.

Are you convinced? It’s said that after Hercules completed his 12 tasks, one of the gods tried to cheat him out of his reward and all his work almost went for nothing. It’s unlikely that this will be anything more than a great idea on paper because we are dealing after all with the geniuses at the NCAA. But if it does happen, remember where you heard it first.