Non-traditional teams with great seasons and little hope for a national championship cause fans and writers to holler for a playoff system in college football every year. The ruckus often starts mid-season, as one non-traditional team separates itself from the pack as that year’s great hope of the non-powerhouse football teams. This year the chatter started even earlier, as there are six or seven unexpectedly great teams in the top 25.

It’s hard to change anything in college football, because there’s so much money tied up in it for so many parties. That’s why adding a game (the BCS championship) to the season was the only way that anything got changed originally - no one wants to give up their piece of the pie.

The problem with a playoff system thus far is that in most proposed systems, the major bowls (Fiesta, Orange, Sugar, Rose) would lose their elite status. They wouldn’t be able to have the best teams playing in their games because they would already be playing in playoff games. The people in charge of these bowls would do everything in their power to squash a system that lost their games money and status.

If there was a system that minimized the amount of money lost, kept all the bowls intact (including the elites) and had legitimacy in the eyes of the people, that system would have a valid chance at being adopted. Here’s a way it could happen:

Since we can’t eliminate any post-season games and have the plan be accepted, we won’t. We’ll create more games in the form of a seven-game, eight-team playoff including the top eight BCS-ranked teams. First obstacle avoided: we won’t alienate the moneymakers up at the BCS.

The match-ups will be paired March Madness style, with 1 playing 8, 2 playing 7, 3 playing 6, and 4 playing 5. The playoff’s first four games will start December 15, after finals week at most colleges (knocks out the “a playoff places strain on student-athletes” argument). After the first four games are decided, the winners will move on to the next two games, to be played on December 22 (giving athletes and coaches time to be home for Christmas, knocking out the “anti-family” argument). The final game will be played at the same time as the current BCS championship.

The playoff system is purely a method to determine the contenders for the national championship game - it is completely unrelated to who goes to the Fiesta/Orange/Sugar/Rose bowls. Because the playoff system will be considered completely outside the realm of bowl games, those teams that lose in the early rounds of the playoff system fall right back into the BCS system to populate the four elite bowls. If the No. 7 and No. 8 BCS-ranked teams win the playoff and end up being in the national championship game, they’ll jump up to No. 1 and No. 2 for purposes of ranking, and the other teams will shift down from their end-of-season rankings. The playoff system will not create any extra weekly polls - again, this is outside the realms of the bowl system or anything else. That way the four big bowls get to keep their good games.