The College Football Playoffs will never be a perfect system. Even the NFL playoff system has its flaws. However, I think every year we should evaluate what works best, and what is so bad that it needs to be changed. The best leagues in the world understand that to successfully grow, you need to be open to needed change and progression. These are just a few of the things I’d change to take another step in creating the best possible product when it comes to the College Football Playoffs.

1. Move everything up. I’d like to see the National Title game played on New Year’s Day.
2. Eliminate bye weeks completely.
3. Have on campus home games through the Quarterfinals, and only have neutral site games for the Semifinals and the Title game.
4. If you must include “Group of 5,” remove their autobid, and if there is a clear-cut winner out of that group let one in. If there are two like this year with Tulane and James Madison, make them play each other as a “play-in” game with the winner officially joining the CFBPlayoff bracket. We are doing the entire product a disservice letting more than one in.
5. To be eligible for consideration in the College Football Playoffs, you must be in a conference, and play a true conference schedule. All teams should be playing by the same rules and/or structure.
6. Completely do away with autobids for any and all conference champions. It helps avoid an issue like with Virginia and Duke this past year for everyone. Use the conference champions as a piece for creating seeding.
7. Absolutely NO “Notre Dame” deals where your guaranteed a spot with a certain criteria or if you get a certain amount of wins. If you read deeper into those types of deals, they are completely unethical and lean towards product manipulation. Those types of things WILL lead to litigation against both the school, the NCAA, and the governing body of the College Football playoffs.
8. Either conference title games help and/or hurt 100%, or they aren’t counted for or against a team. Avoid the Alabama got hammered in theirs and made it, and BYU lost in theirs and didn’t make it. Both lost to the same team in the regular season and in their respective conference championship game. Those were BYU’s only losses where Alabama also lost to a very bad Florida State team. The conference title games are either always used or never. Bring some morality to this.

BOWL GAME SIDE NOTE:

IF your program can field a healthy team with enough participants, you have to participate in the Bowl game if you’re invited or eligible. If you opt out for no valid reason, you forfeit your right to play in the College Football Playoffs the following year. Some schools need to learn to treat the sport they say they love, and has provided such opportunity to them, better. Leave this place better than you found it for the next set of players, coaches, and administrators. If that is too harsh for you softies, take something else, like scholarships, or the ability to use a certain amount of money to pay recruits. The only thing it needs to accomplish, is it HAS to truly hurt so they don’t do it again, and we can stop having selfish teams sit while we all have to be force fed teams who weren’t Bowl eligible, but are being put in, so the games have 2 teams playing each other.