Playoffs won’t answer the debate either. There will be bickering and sour grapes because somebody is left out.
Maybe the BCS is satisfying the problem to the people who do matter.
A playoff system in collegiate football isn't workable because the playoff system would be nearly as long and far more grueling than the regular season. Many teams play cupcakes during the regular season for reasons of conditioning, injuries and the fact that the players are supposed to be students first. With sudden death playoffs similar to basketball, the ultimate winner has to play six additional games? Furthermore, that would crush the Bowl system since it is nearly impossible for alumni and other fans (in stadium filling numbers) to make travel plans at the last minute to attend what might be their team's last game in some far flung city.
Then we need to look at society's present condition in terms of competition. We now have two generations of people who have been raised in the Participation Trophy Age. We have abandoned any form of reasonable metric to determine winners and loses (at least from can be gathered from reading BCS threads) and even winning a game isn't considered a fair indicator.
So, IMHO, we have the perfect "playoff" system now in the BCS. It works similar in principle to a firing squad in which no one can make a certain claim of responsibility for the execution. The BCS uses all kinds of convoluted formulas, illogical rules, injections of "fairness", bribery, craven greed, subjective opinion and other totally lousy metrics for ascertaining who plays and who sits at home watching it all on TV. Its convoluted and illogical so that no one can take responsibility/blame for the outcome and we can all be angry about a non-personal system rather than hanging the NCAA commissioner from a lamp-post when our team doesn't make the cut.
The BCS is about as "American" as a system could get. Forget all of this failed competition and "Winners and losers" claptrap. We are Occupy Football Stadiums now.
Every division in college football except the BCS plays one of those “unworkable” playoffs...and makes it work. I’m biased because I went to an FCS school (James Madison, 2004 national champions) but it frosts me a bit that the boosters and administrations at the big Division I-A schools suddenly start talking about “conditioning” and “academics” when the subject of a playoff comes up. Meanwhile, kids in the lower divisions, almost none of whom have a shot at the NFL, are expected to play four or even five extra games to have a crack at a national championship, and nobody seems to mind. (By the way, when my JMU Dukes won their 2004 FCS championship, they had to win every playoff game on the road. How about that for some drama in the third and fourth weeks of December instead of yet another Generic Corporate Sponsor Bowl?)
Sixteen-team playoff, split it by conference however you like. Go back to 11-game regular seasons. Drop about half the crap useless early bowls and use those weekends to play the rounds of the championship, with the semis on New Years weekend and the finals the week after. Let the lower rounds be home games to the higher-seeded team and hold the semis and finals at neutral sites. Heck, even use two of the New Years bowls as the semi-finals and rotate it around every year.
}:-)4