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In a sane world, we would scrap the bowls. There should be an eight team playoff. One team per conference, period, and if the major conferences want to expand to 20 or 30 teams apiece for tv marketing reasons, let 'em flip a coin. (As a serious matter, the oversized conferences would pare back down to a size that permitted a full round robin.) There should be automatic bids for the champions of the top five or six oonferences with room for a couple of at-large teams representiong the best of the rest.

There would be three major factions objecting to this arrangement. The first would be alumni, who want to go to tropical bowls to get drunk in the sun. I don't much care about that.

The second would be major conference runners-up, who would think, sometimes rightly, that they are better than some other team that made the cut. I don't much care about that either. Win your league, or stay at home. And if your league has expanded into a miniature NFL, it's past time for it to slim down to a traditional size.

The third objector would be the television networks, for whom the bowls represent a month long stream of advertising revenues. Network greed is the culprit for so much of what ails our sports today, and the mess in college football is no exception.

Unfortunately, network dollars will probably determine the outcome, as the colleges sold out long ago. The only way we will ever get a legitimate playoff is for the SEC to expand to 300-plus teams to absorb all of Division 1. The expanded SEC would then play a 30 game regular season, followed by an NFL style playoff -- and then the colleges would still have bowls after that. And enough fools would still watch that the networks would continue to sell the game.

why not create four conferences out of the power five with 16 to 20 teams per conference. Each conference could have a championship game with the champions advancing to the semi-finals and the winners playing for the championship. In effect, you would have an eight team playoff with only conference champions advancing to the playoffs. We almost got this a few years ago when the BigXII almost imploded. Too bad Texas ruined it.

We all know that it will eventually settle into an 8 team playoff.

Four teams is just a transitional state from the BCS.

Some are advocating a 16 team playoff, but that would be ridiculous. Four more games after playing 12 or 13 in order to see who's champ? There would be too many cries regarding time lost to schooling and increased chances of injury.

If you want to get drunken alumni and bowl fanatics on board with an eight team playoff all you need to do is get rid of the fanaticism associated with having winning teams play at home.

An eight team playoff would require seven games. Why can't these seven games be labeled as bowl games such as Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, etc. and played in large destination stadiums?

If the teams are good and their fans travel then they can play anywhere, especially if the playoffs drag on and most people would rather spend it in California or Florida than Oregon.