My only objection to playoffs is that it would take away the week-to-week drama. I mean who even pays attention to college basketball until the NCAA Tournament? You’d have the same thing to some extent in college football if you had playoffs.
So my solution is immediately at the end of the season, have a drawing, with the Final Top 32 teams to pick two games in the following season, for each team against random non-conference opponents that also finished in the Top 32. Each team would play one of the games at home and the other away. The games would all be played on two weekends which would be reserved for those games, one early in the year, the other towards the end of the year. I think it would be huge with all of those marquee games being played over those weekends. So for example, Florida would have their 8 SEC games, the two BCS games, FSU and one homecoming opponent. I think with this system it will be much easier at the end of the year to determine who really deserves to play for the Title.
I still think the nature of football is such that you'll always have this controversy -- simply because there are so few games in the season and too many teams for everyone to play each other.
It's really no different in the NFL. The AFC East can conceivably be won by a 9-7 team, and there's a decent possibility that one or two 10-6 teams can find themselves on the outside looking in at playoff time.
I really don’t think you can compare the week-to-week drama of football vs. basketball because there are 3 times as many games in a college basketball season.
I certainly don’t think you can say the NFL doesn’t have week-to-week drama despite the fact that it has a playoff system, and despite the fact that the NFL season is 4 games longer than college. Also, it is far easier to make the 12-team NFL playoff field than it would be to make even the 16-team playoff field in the most ambitious college playoff proposals.
The most ambitious proposal I’ve seen would be for a 16-team playoff, with each of the 11 conference champions receiving an automatic berth, with the rest being filled by at-large bids. There would be no more than two teams from any one conference, so there would still be a great deal of competition week-to-week for conference championships and for the very limited number of at-large berths. Also, even the top teams would still have a lot to play for, because there would be a big incentive to get a high seed and play, say, the Sun Belt conference champion rather than, say, Iowa.
While the small conference champions are obviously going to be big underdogs, that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t see surprises like we do from time to time in college basketball.
Finally, the basic fact is that while we can all throw out statistics on “strength of schedule”, that doesn’t tell us squat about which team is actually better. Where I come from, the way you find out if one team is better than another is to have them play each other. That’s the whole point of competitive sports. If we could decide which team is better through a bunch of statistics, we could just save everyone the trouble and simulate every game with a computer - which, when you think about it, is all the BCS really is.
Football championships should be decided on the field, not through computers or through AP beauty contests.