[kevkrom]

Okay... let's assume they do the 11 conference winner plus 5 at large playoff system. I'll assume for the sake of argment that BCS rank will serve as the at-large qualifier.

The 11 conference winners would be:

• Ohio State (1)
• Florida (2)
• USC (5) <-- assuming they get the nod over Cal due to head-to-head
• Louisville (6)
• Boise State (8)
• Oklahoma (10)
• Wake Forest (14)
• BYU (20)
• Houston (NR, 10-3)
• Central Michigan (NR, 9-4)
• Troy (NR, 7-5) <-- assuming they get the nod over Mid Tenn St. (7-5) due to head-to-head

The at-large teams would be:<>

• Michigan (3)
• LSU (4)
• Wisconsin (7)
• Auburn (9)
• Notre Dame (11)

Looking in from the outside would be Arkansas (12), West Virginia (13), and Rutgers (16).

Assuming playoff seeding by current BCS ranks, the first round matchups would be:

• (1) Ohio State vs. (16) Troy -- yawn
• (2) Florida vs. (15) Central Michigan -- yawn
• (3) Michigan vs. (14) Houston -- yawn
• (4) LSU vs. (13) West Virginia -- possible interest
• (5) USC vs. (12) Wake Forest -- probable yawn
• (6) Louisville vs. (11) Notre Dame -- ND always draws viewers, winner gets right to be crushed by Michigan next week
• (7) Wisconsin vs. (10) Oklahoma -- good game
• (8) Boise State vs. (9) Auburn -- not much national interest but a chance for BSU to prove they're "for real"

So, 2... maybe 3... good games in the first round. We'll assume for the sake of argument that the higher seeds win across the board, except for Auburn. Round 2:

• (1) Ohio State vs. (9) Auburn -- good game, for a while
• (2) Florida vs. (7) Wisconsin -- good game if Wisconsin can control the clock
• (3) Michigan vs. (6) Louisville -- doubtful that UL can hang with UM for long
• (4) LSU vs. (5) USC -- get the popcorn ready

Not a bad set of matchups... perhaps the top-8 should have just been in the playoff to begin with rather than the yawner of a first round we saw for the most part. Also, with two Big-10 vs. SEC matchups, we'd get a chance to see which conference was really better. Florida would have to go through three straight Big 10 teams to win the whole thing...

[Always Right]

Not a bad set of matchups... perhaps the top-8

Top 8 is the best we could hope for. Except they would probably limit it to two schools from the same conference like they do now, so Wisconsin is screwed. Maybe the Badgers would finally be convinced to schedule one decent outside conference game.

[GraniteStateConservative]

I don't mind the BCS rankings. Just grab the top 16 from that and do the seeding. Now, those results would be good games!

[SoothingDave]

Not a bad set of matchups... perhaps the top-8 should have just been in the playoff to begin with rather than the yawner of a first round we saw for the most part.

We'll soon have a top 4 playoff and that will be good enough. Does anyone seriously think L'ville or Wisc. or Boise St. is going to run the table?

Let the teams and their fans have the bowls. They get a nice holiday, the bowls make money, we get football on TV every day for a month and half the teams end their season as winners.

The BCS bowls are now one week before the national championship game. How long until you figure they will use two of the BCS bowls each year as semi-finals? It's all slowly coming into place.

4 teams is enough. What are people talking about this year? Florida or Michigan. OSU is a given. That's three teams. Never in my life have people been confused about which of 5 or 6 teams should be #1.