[Will88]

Bearing all of that in mind, a 4-team or 8-team makes the most sense.

Probably so, with maybe a wildcard week to give some of the weaker conferences a chance to qualify a team or two. But I doubt it'll go beyond four this year, and there is a meeting to take place today to discuss these and other NCAA matters,

[kevkrom]

Yeah, I don't think they're going to make as drastic a move as to go for an 8- or 16-team playoff right away. Even a move to the four-team "plus one" system will be painted as reactionary to this year's results, so they might even be slow to go that far.

A four-team playoff this year would have been:

(1) LSU vs. (4) Stanford
(2) Alabama vs. (3) Oklahoma State

Pretty good stuff, actually, and likely would have drawn better ratings for both those games and the final, and we wouldn't have this debate over whether OSU should have gotten the nod over 'Bama -- they'd have played each other for the privilege.

An eight-team bracket would have been:

(1) LSU vs. Kansas State
(2) Alabama vs. Boise State
(3) Oklahoma State vs. Arkansas
(4) Stanford vs. Oregon
A couple of interesting things here... LSU and Alabama shouldn't have been tested too hard by those teams, but neither could they look past them.  Stanford and Oregon would be in secondary Pac-10 title game!

But most interesting would be Oklahoma State.  Their road to the championship would likely have taken them through the top 3 teams in the SEC (Arkansas, then Alabama, then LSU).  No doubt they would have deserved the title if they could have pulled that off!