Does Notre Dame have to be in a Conference? How are tie breakers settled? What if, let's say Ohio State is #15 at 9-2 and Maryland is 9-2, who goes? How do you come up with an objective system of ranking 117 teams, with a 12 game scheduled?
You are going to have to start the week before Labor day, no breaks, have all conference title games by Thanksgiving.
Then you have to expect teams and fans to be willing to spend bigs bucks on a moments notice.
Is the #15 in the BCS?
What is Maryland ranked?
You take the higher rank.
The system for ranking all 119 teams is already in place, but it needs to be refined and hammered out so that there are no polls before week 5. By then, most teams have placed at least 3 games.
Tie breakers?
Notre Dame must have at least a .750 winning pct (or 9 wins, whichever comes first) and must be within the top 10 of the BCS to be considered.
Actually, the scheduling could stay the same.
Keep the conference title games on the first weekend of December and start the first round the next week. It eliminates the stupid break most teams get after their final game.
A college football playoff is now going to happen, it is now just a matter of how soon. A week or so ago the new head of the BCS said that they were willing to allow a new championship game composed of the 2 highest ranked winners of the BCS games and made it sound like they were open to doing so during the new contract with Fox, rather than waiting until the next round of negotiations. That is a 4 team playoff, and open the door to the final simple step that would move it to 8 teams. Simply take the 4 BCS bowl winners and let the 2 highest ranked host on campus home games, with the winners of that round matching up in the nat'l champ game.
Doesn't change anything that takes place now (except the forced pairing of 1 and 2 in the BCS round, which the Rose Bowl hated), just adds 3 games and only 1 bowl. Preserves all the existing bowls, doesn't hurt bowl attendance(people are still going to take those New Years vacations), doesn't interrupt finals in December, and actually increasing viewership (and thus revenues.) However the one fly in the ointment would be the poison pill-esque proposal the BCS has for adding a 5th bowl outside of the championship game (to placate the small schools/conferences and their politicians.) But that could be dealt with by putting the 2 lowest ranked teams in that bowl. Best scenario is to take 6 BCS conference champs and 4 wildcards and putting the 2 lowest ranked of all of them in the "Missed It By That Much" Bowl, solving the FSU dilemma and making it a true 8 team playoff. Conference politics may insist on putting just the 2 lowest ranked wildcards in that bowl, but the system would still get somewhere between 5 and 8 of the 8 highest ranked teams in the playoffs.
Maybe not perfect, but a heck of a lot better than what now exists, and probably at least an 80+% chance of producing the same champion that a 16 team playoff would. I'd say the odds of the current 2 team playoff getting right is about 50%, at best. The underdog has won 6 of 8 mythical NC games, an indicator of how fuzzy the rankings are at that level of precision. Open it up to 6-8 teams and the odds of getting right zoom up substantially.