By Pete Quint

Location

To relieve the financial strain on the alumni and fan base first round games will be played at the home school of the higher ranked team.  This would also give the higher team a legitimate home field advantage especially for the northern teams.  Many have wondered how warm climate teams would fair in Wisconsin, Nebraska and Colorado deep into December. 

A home game would not only reward the fans and the team but it would also dump an incredible amount of money into the athletic department’s coffers.  Trust me that the TV ratings would be a lot better than many of the early bowl games and the advertisers would be lined up around the block to by air time.

Final Four / Championship Game

The “Final Four” round would be the traditional New Years Day BCS bowl; Rose, Orange, Fiesta and Sugar.  The Championship game would be a week later at one of the previously mentioned bowls on a rotational basis.  Very similar to what we already have with the BCS Bowl Series with a different kind of “plus one”.

What do we do with the Bowls?

Using the BCS bowls as the final four/championship game will settle the national championship but there’s no reason that the other bowls shouldn’t exist.  Teams and fans will still get excited to go to a post season game in a sunny location (unless you go to the Motor City or Music City bowls), corporate sponsors will still shell out big bucks for luxury boxes and television ratings will continue to sell advertising space.  Nothing will be lost.

Is it by design that controversy swirls around college football?  Are the university presidents purposefully holding back the play-off scenario just to propagate debate in the national and local media as well as the office water cooler?  It’s been said that even bad publicity is still good publicity and the BCS certainly is a lasting conversation topic.

Not only is there a lot of money to be made with a play-off system like this but there will be closure to each and every season.  This system will crown a true national champion.

As this article goes to print, there seems to be some an antitrust investigation starting up against the BCS.  The interesting Yahoo! article can be read here http://sports.yahoo.com/ncaaf/news?slug=ap-congress-bowlgames&prov=ap&type=lgns.  The three congressmen are from Hawaii, Georgia and Idaho so each individual has a recent beef with the current system and if the investigation goes forward it could lead to a play-off faster than anyone could have anticipated.