That works best (it’s still not perfect – see: State, Boise) but it won’t happen in real life. The more balanced (or weaker, if you prefer) power conferences will never agree to a system that could lock their champions out under any circumstances. They would get support from everywhere that the non-BCS teams did when they were lobbying to be let into the BCS party, if it were to happen.

Only issue I could see with a longer season would be interfering with basketball, which is really too long anyways. Shorten the basketball season to 20 games played over two months starting in November, and then the conference championships in January. College football in February, let basketball have their meaningless tourneys that are usually held in the preseason now, so that teams have a chance to prep for the Big Dance. Give the selection committee a full month to pick the 65 teams, and announce them the day after the football championship. March Madness begins, riding on the fun of the football playoffs.

The players, coaches, etc. will all have a problem with a season that lasts that much longer and adds that many more games. It would basically destroy any semblance of Winter Break for student-athletes, force them to condition harder and start that earlier (weaker conditioning is why rookies hit a wall in the NFL) and several other things would have to change for the worse that I can’t even think of just now. Ideally we could just keep adding weeks to the season to produce more certainty with championships and give us more fun games, but it’s just not that easy.

Re: Cross-sport comps. The truth is that college football is unique because it tries to select a single champion out of 119 teams, most of which don’t ever play each other or have anyone on their schedule that plays anyone on someone else’s schedule.

I believe that the Giants strength and the Patriots relative weakness this season informs this impression too much. New York needed a ridiculous play (Manning escaping the sack and then the Tyree helmet catch on a crucial 3rd and 5) to string together an improbable 12 play, 83 yard TD drive to take the final three-point lead with just 2:42 left in the game. To me, that’s a pretty even match-up, especially when you consider their earlier game (a three-point New England win at the Meadowlands on the final week of the regular season). If the 2007 Pats and the 2007 Giants played 100 times, I’d be surprised if the final win-loss tally ended up far from 50/50. Outside of their heads-up parity (a factor of match-up, not necessarily overall skill or performance) New England ran the table and New York was a six-loss team. Moreover, the final three teams that the 2007 Giants beat in the postseason had already beaten them in the regular season (Dallas did it twice) by an average margin of 11.5, which is more than their total margin of victory in those playoff rematches. There is just no way that anyone can convince me that the New York Giants were the best team in the NFL in the 2007 season; they were simply rewarded by a system that devalues the regular season and rewards the teams that are hottest towards the end of the year. Were the playoffs fun and, the Giants’ Cinderella run especially, exciting? Sure. But were they fair to the better teams (three of them) that had already defeated those same Giants earlier in the year? I don’t think so. Did they produce a “true” champion? Again, I politely disagree.

In a four-team playoff world: “instead of just Texas (and possibly USC) having a legitimate gripe with the BCS, at least four schools would have been screaming bloody murder at the end of this season”. In an eight team playoff world: “A minimum of three schools would have been shafted under any variant of this system and most likely many more than that”. In other words, the BCS slighted one(Texas) maybe two (USC) teams this year, whereas the playoffs would cause an uproar at anywhere from three to ten schools and just about anywhere in between depending on the variant selected. So, you’re not trading 3rd place in the BCS for 5th or 9th place in a playoff, but rather one or two teams trying to get into one game versus many more teams with legitimate claims for a playoff spot. Another way to look at it is this: there are many fewer great teams (usually the only ones that become candidates for the BCS) than there are very good ones (which would be candidates for a playoff). I hope that’s clear now.

I like your train of thought about playoffs and champions, but I feel like I need to think about it further to reply. I will say that, in the end, playoffs give only two teams the right to play for the championship (other teams can try and fail, not unlike the college football regular season) and that the BCS is itself a one-game playoff of sorts. I know that probably doesn’t make sense on first read (and might not to some ever) but I swear it does in my head and I probably just have to explain it better. Thanks for the thoughtful comment, though, and I look forward to your reply to mine.