In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama came out in favor of an 8-team playoff system to remedy the broken college football system, which would have replaced the current 2-team playoff of one game. But for a man who has been the face of change, this is an especially small-ball populist approach to the main problem in college football; that is, the subjectiveness of the sportswriters determining which teams are the most worthy.
If we were to implement an 8-team playoff system, the annual stew would be about why the 9th and 10th place teams didn't get in. The NCAA basketball tournament has the same problem with subjectivity, but their solution was to expand the field to such a gargantuan size that the difficult decision on if a bubble team gets in or not is practically moot. Who cares if the Richmond Spiders or the Creighton Blue Jays didn't quite make it? They were probably going to lose in the first round anyways.
Most professional sports leagues don't require a human to determine which teams deserve a post-season. This is because there are only 20 or 30 possible teams to choose from. Everyone's schedule has relatively the same factor of difficulty, and so no team has to be handicapped by a sportswriter or poll voter. In college football, there are 100+ teams to choose from, and one team can only play at most 12 or 13 other teams. Comparing teams thus requires some subjective factors, because head-to-head matchups are rare between non-conference foes.
But not everything is subjective. Athletic conference winners are determined not by sportswriters or strength-of-schedule, but by teams actually playing each other. There are tiebreak rules and everything in case two teams have an equal record at the end of the season. Conferences can do this because there are only between 8 and 12 teams to choose from. But unfortunately not all conferences are created equal. If we just had conference winners play each other as a playoff system, the new argument would be something like "why does the Big East #1 get to have a chance at a championship while the clearly superior Big 12 #2 doesn't?"
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What I am proposing is that we blow-up the conferences and create a 32-team Uberleague. The Uberleague will consist of 4 divisions of 8 regionally-similar teams.
Each team will play 12 games: 7 games within the division, one game each from the other 3 divisions, and 2 games from the pool of college teams outside the Uberleague. This way old-fashioned college rivalries can remain intact even when one team is in the Superleague and the other team is not.
After the end of the Uberleague season (the first week in December), a twelve-team playoff will commence. The playoff will be a seeded tournament, with the top four seeds given to each division's champion.
The seeding will be based on best overall record. Tiebreaks outside the division will be, in order, as follows: head-to-head matchups, if applicable, then league record, then divisional record, then record against common teams (minimum possible = 2), then quality of best win, then quality of second best win, etc., and then coin flip.
Division winners will be based on the divisional record. Tiebreaks within the division will be based on head-to-head record. In the event of a three-way tie, divisional winner will be determined based on tiebreak rules similar to interdivisional tiebreak rules.
When there are two teams with the same overall record within the same division, the team with the better divisional record cannot be seeded lower than the team with the worse divisional record.
The top four seeds earn a bye week and a home game similar to the NFL's playoff system.
The playoffs will occupy four straight weekends starting in the second weekend in December and ending the first weekend of January.
But here's the part that makes this Uberleague more interesting than every other professional league: relegation. The bottom team in each division should be kicked out of the Uberleague for the next year. The best four teams from the remaining 88 college teams outside the Uberleague would be promoted to the Uberleague the next year. Because every crappy team needs a healthy dose of fear to get them to perform to their fullest.
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So which teams should be in the Uberleague? I believe that it shouldn't just be the 32 best teams from this year. To make the Uberleague palatable, it needs to include not only the best teams, but also perennial contenders who are going through some down times (like Michigan). The Uberleague is designed to contain the teams with certain gravitas; if a team went to, say, the Rose Bowl a couple of times in the '90s but has failed to make a splash since then (Northwestern), that team would not get into the inaugural Uberleague. However, if a team was a powerhouse from a bygone era (Navy; Clemson, maybe; Arkansas) without any more recent success, they would not make it into the inaugural Uberleague. Memories are short.
So I came up with a very simple formula based on the final AP rating of each college team for the past twenty years that expands geometrically as seed approaches 1 and year approaches the current year, with a few tweaks to soften the mathematical effects. This rewards both consistency and excellence.
The 32 teams chosen by this formula are updated every week during the college football season. The formula was designed so that there would not be a lot of variability in the composition of the Uberleague from week to week, but teams at the margins could see their rankings move enough to put them either in or out of the Uberleague.
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