(bumped to the front page, not because I agree with every word, but because this amount of work should be recognized. Nice stuff, talonk)

First off, a disclaimer. I know this will never ever, ever, ever happen. So please don’t rip on this article because of that. But if I had my druthers, this is how I would have college football set up, because I feel it would give it the best competitive edge and most satisfactory outcome.

Currently there are 120 schools in the FBS (1-A). That actually is a perfect number for my scenario. Unfortunately, those 120 schools are divided into 11 conferences (!). This leaves for some strange setups. Some have 12, some have 9, and even the MAC has 13(!). But one and only one conference has the correct alignment. That would be the Pac 10. The Pac 10 has 10 teams. They actually play each school in their conference once. No rotating schools out, like the Big 10 does. No conference championship game like the Big 12 and SEC (those are cheap money grabs because rarely are the 2 best teams playing in that game). The Pac 10 actually decides their champion on the field by playing each school in its conference.

Well look at the number of schools that we have, 120, take my perfect conference team number of 10, and voila, we end up with 12 conferences. So that obviously means we have to reorganize the conferences a little bit.

Additionally, we also have the fact that not all FBS schools are created equal. Out of those 120 schools, 66 current are from BCS conferences, (including Notre Dame), and 54 are from non-BCS conferences. There is no way around it, but 6 teams are going to have to lose their “BCS” status.

Now there really is no fair way to determine which 6 schools get knocked down a peg, but my solution was to take each school’s record since 1985 and drop the worst six in that time frame. Those six ended up being Baylor, Rutgers, Northwestern, Iowa St, Vanderbilt and Duke. The only deviation I had was to make, was to substitute Baylor for Kentucky as Kentucky had more bowl appearances than Baylor over that time frame, with almost identical winning percentages (.418 to .413).

So now that we have 60 BCS schools, we can realign them as follows [with former conference affiliation in ( )]:

ACC: Clemson, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Maryland, Miami FL, North Carolina, North Carolina State, South Carolina (SEC), South Florida (Big East) and Wake Forest

SWC (formerly Big 12): Colorado, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Texas A&M and Texas Tech

Big East: Boston College (ACC), Cincinnati, Connecticut, Louisville, Penn State (Big 10), Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Virginia (ACC), Virginia Tech (ACC) and West Virginia

Big 10: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Notre Dame (Ind.), Ohio State, Purdue and Wisconsin

Pac 10: Arizona, Arizona State, California, Oregon, Oregon State, Stanford, UCLA, USC, Washington and Washington State

SEC:  Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, LSU, Mississippi State, Ole Miss and Tennessee

As you can see, there was just a little bit of shifting in the ACC and Big East. If we were to go strictly geographically, I would have moved Florida to the ACC to have all the Florida schools in same conference, Louisville to the SEC, and Maryland to the Big East. But this alignment keeps the majority of the conferences intact.

Now we have to align the non-BCS schools. This is a bit trickier. The ideal set up would have each one of the non-BCS conferences essentially a sister conference for the BCS conference. And right now, there are some very strange setups with Conference USA spread from New Mexico to Tennessee, and the MAC with 13 teams.

Additionally, there have also been some very poor performers with the non-BCS schools. So again I dropped 6 schools down to the FCS level and pulled the top 6 programs from FCS up to the non-BCS level. The six schools dropped were Ohio U, Buffalo, New Mexico State, Florida International (FIU), Kent State and Temple. They all had winning percentages below .300 (except Ohio U at .318). The top FCS schools since 1985 that were moved up were: Dayton (.823), North Dakota State (.759), Montana (.748), Georgia Southern (.737), Northern Iowa (.715) and Appalachian State (.712).

[Note I’d also love to reorganize the FCS, but don’t want to get into that here]

I realigned these schools strictly geographically so they could almost mirror the BCS conferences [with former conference affiliation in ( )]:

Conference USA [ACC sister conference]: Alabama-Birmingham, Central Florida, East Carolina, Florida Atlantic (Sun Belt), Georgia Southern (Southern-FCS), Memphis, Middle Tennessee State (Sun Belt), Southern Mississippi, Troy (Sun Belt) and Vanderbilt (SEC)

MWC [SWC sister conference]: Air Force, Baylor (Big 12), Brigham Young, Colorado State, North Dakota State (Missouri Valley-FCS), New Mexico, Tulsa (CUSA), Texas-El Paso (CUSA), Utah and Utah State (WAC)

Metro (new conference) [Big East sister conference]: Akron (MAC), Appalachian State (Southern-FCS), Army (Ind.), Bowling Green (MAC), Dayton (Pioneer-FCS), Duke (ACC), Marshall (CUSA), Miami OH (MC), Navy (Ind.) and Rutgers (Big East)

MAC [Big 10 sister conference]: Ball State, Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Iowa State (Big 12), Northern Illinois, Northern Iowa (Missouri Valley-FCS), Northwestern (Big 10), Toledo, Western Kentucky (Sun Belt) and Western Michigan

WAC [Pac 10 sister conference]: Boise State, Fresno State, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana (Big Sky-FCS), Nevada, Nevada-Las Vegas (MWC), San Diego State (MWC), San Jose State and Wyoming (MWC)

Sun Belt [SEC sister conference]: Arkansas State, Houston (CUSA), Louisiana Tech (WAC), Louisiana-Lafayette, Louisiana- Monroe, North Texas, Rice (CUSA), Southern Methodist (CUSA), Texas Christian (MWC) and Tulane (CUSA)

I know what you are thinking “But wait, you cannot just drop my team from so-and-so conference, that isn’t fair!” There will be way for the schools to recapture their BCS or non-BCS status. But let us discuss scheduling first before I delve into that topic.

So now that we have all 12 conferences set up with 10 teams each, scheduling actually becomes much easier than in past years. Every team plays each team from their own conference, so that takes 9 games off the 12 game schedule, leaving 3 for out of conference (OOC) match-ups.

To determine the 3 OOC games, I would propose the following. Each year, the BCS conferences rotate match-ups. For example, in year 1, the Big 10 plays the ACC, year 2, the Big East, and so on. Also, the match-ups should correspond to rankings (or as close to it), 1 plays 1, 2 plays 2 and so on with home games rotating among the match-ups as well. And, the non-BCS schools would rotate just like their sister BCS conferences as well.

The second OOC game would be against the sister conference. Again, this would be 1 plays 1, 2 plays 2, etc. with the home games rotating as well. That just leaves one last OOC game to schedule. This is the open game that every school can use to schedule specific rivalry games such as USC-Notre Dame etc. One caveat would be, that if a FBS school wants to schedule an FCS school for that third game, the FCS school would have had to have made the FCS playoffs once in the last 3 seasons. Lastly, with the season no longer needing the last week for championship games, all seasons can end the week of Thanksgiving, allowing each team one, and only one, bye throughout the season

After a 5 year cycle, the records (regular season only) of all teams would be analyzed, and then a reshuffling would occur similar to how Europe soccer leagues promote and demote teams. The worst BCS school in each conference would get slotted down to the sister non-BCS conference, with the sister conference’s best team moving up to the BCS level. Also, the worst team in the non-BCS conference would slide down to FCS, with the top 6 schools in FCS moving up. If realignment needed to be done at the end of the five years based on teams moving up and down, so be it.

Playoffs, did someone mention playoffs? Well yes, I did (albeit FCS). Now that we no longer have the need for conference championship games (since we decide it on the field), this leads into the perfect scenario for establishing a playoff system as well. We now have 12 conference champions to seed in a 16 team playoff field. Using a BCS-type formula, we would take the next 4 highest ranked schools and seed the teams 1-16 also using that BCS-type formula. This would establish the bracket used to determine the champion.

Instead of having conference championship games the first weekend December, we can have the first round of the playoffs occur that week, with the 16 seed playing at the 1 seed, 15 seed at the 2 seed, etc.

Two weeks later at 4 bowl locations to be determined (right now there are a lot of 6-6 and 7-5 teams playing that weekend), on the third weekend in December, the quarterfinals could be played. Then the semifinals can be played in two of the BCS games (Rose, Orange, Sugar and Fiesta) with the four losers of Round 2 in the other two BCS games. The four BCS games would rotate these games so each would get their fair share of the playoffs.

Ideally, the Championship game would be 2 weeks after the BCS semifinals, but having it a week later is fine as well.

Additionally, the Bowl system is still in place. All other teams that didn’t make the playoffs can still go to their respective bowls they are currently aligned with. Also, the losers of Round 1 of the playoffs would also be eligible for a bowl game as well, especially since that game occurs in the first week of December. All eight teams which reach round 2 are assured of a BCS payoff.

The main effect of this is that we would end up with a fairer way of scheduling, and we would determine a true champion on the field, both for conferences and for the national title. Plus the bowls (except for BCS of course) return to being what they were designed to be, exhibitions that have no bearing on the national title picture.