By Brian Prato

Staff Writer

For a few years now, the bowl system in college football has been repeatedly bashed, and some feel it’s time for a change. It’s time for a college football playoff system.

This year, the national championship is between Auburn and Oregon. Auburn being from the Southeastern Conference and Oregon from the PAC-10. The SEC has won the last 4 National Championships and will be going for their fifth straight. Typical college football placing a few powerhouse conferences in the title game.

Too many fans, analysts, and even the coaches and players, have been saying that they feel the bowl games are an outrage. Games like the “KRAFT Fight Hunger Bowl”, “Capital One Bowl” and the “MAACO Las Vegas Bowl” are an utter joke to the majority of the country,  and nobody in the country cares about these games except for the schools themselves participating in the bowl, and the students that attend the schools that are participating.

A playoff system would be the ideal way to handle this situation, but still nothing has been done.

This year there have been more than two teams that have done very well for themselves other than the teams actually participating in the BCS National Championship. The Texas Christian University Horned Frogs played in the Rose Bowl against the Big Ten powerhouse Wisconsin Badgers. TCU, coming into the game 11-0, needed one win to complete a perfect season. They ended up prevailing over Wisconsin 21-19 and completed their season undefeated. Happy about the win, the players and coaches were still a little disappointed over the fact that they didn’t lose a game all year, but they couldn’t compete for the crown of top team in the nation.

Another very disappointing story is the season of the Boise State Broncos. 10-0 heading into the final game of the season, hoping to finish

with an undefeated record and a possible bid to a prestigious BCS bowl game, they only had Nevada to beat. The game went to overtime, and their kicker was put in position to win the game not once, but twice. He missed both field goal attempts, and Nevada kicked a field goal shortly after the misses to win. That single flaw should not define a team’s season.

These kinds of things cost a team their whole season. In my mind this is a complete joke how small mistakes and a loss can take teams completely out of the equation when talking about best team in the country. Bowl games do not settle anything. The only positive they provide for the teams is finishing on a good note. Nobody else cares about the games.

Another thing about these bowl games, they are held at a neutral site. There is no home team, no advantage, not that same type of intensity that you feel when you watch a game in Michigan’s “Big House” or “The Swamp” in Florida. No feeling to the game is there.

In the entire nation, in all conferences, there were a total of 24 teams finishing with double digit wins. All of them except for two (Auburn, Oregon) will not get the opportunity to play on the biggest stage in college football. That’s 22 teams that played in pointless bowl games. Disappointing if you ask me.

In order to be fair to all the teams in college football, the NCAA needs to get on top of a playoff system as soon as possible. It would provide so much more fairness to all the teams in college football and would satisfy most casual fans. The thing is, a playoff system only brings positives to the table when talking about the schools themselves and the fans. The only thing that gets hurt is the advertising business and the sponsors of all the games.

Home-field advantage is huge when talking about any sport. The NCAA has some of the most hostile environments in all of sports, and they are being kept out of the scene in bowl games. In a playoff, the games would be played at an actual stadium of one of the teams. Not an advertisement paradise, but a real game for the fans, players, and coaches. Now tell me, would you rather watch a playoff game between LSU and South Carolina at “Death Valley” in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, or the same game, but at a neutral site. Thought so.

If it were me running NCAA football, I would take the top 20 teams in the country, record wise, and put them in a bracket with the seeding at random. To divide the bracket into two, the teams would be placed in at random once again. This makes things interesting and it proposes that anything can happen. In this way, this system, a true winner would be found in the end of the day and everyone would be satisfied. Some people may have different opinions on how things should be handled if a playoff system were to sprout up, but I feel that’s the best way to come about it.

In the end, I am just a typical college football fan looking for the best talents in the country playing against each other. With a full fledged playoff system, the top team in the country will be found and it would stop the pain of having to watch pointless bowl games throughout December and January. Teams like TCU, Boise State, Stanford, Virginia Tech, Ohio State, Florida State, and several others should at least get a shot at taking home a national title. They have the oppertunity if changes were to be made to the highly disliked system.

In the end I see playoffs in college football being adopted by the NCAA over the next 5 years maximum.

Playoff college football. I like the sound of that.