President-elect Barack Obama to push eight-team college playoff on 60 Minutes
http://blogs.usatoday.com/gameon/2008/11/obama-to-push-e.html

Exactly...it should be 16 teams...

Agreed, it needs to be 16 teams.

There needs to be room for a worthy champion from all 11 conferences in the hypothetical instance that all conferences produce a worthy champion.
This year you may still have 3 undefeated teams from conferences that lack an automatic BCS qualifier -
Boise St. - WAC
Utah - MWC
Ball St. - MAC

Who's to say that you couldn't have that from C-USA, Sun-Belt, Independent as well ?

NCAA by-laws state that half of all tournament slots be reserved for "at-large". If this playoff were run by the NCAA, 16 slots could provide AQ's for the current 6 champions:
ACC, SEC, BE, B-10, B-XII, PAC. And there is room for 2 more, should 2 other conferences regularly produce worthy champions.

With 6 AQ's, there is room for 10 at-large teams. May as well just fill them based on rankings, with say, a cap of 3 teams from the same conference. This will allow the power conferences to have multiple slots, if their team's rankings warrant it.

At that point, it would be hard to imagine a team that had any claim to a shot at the NC not being included in having an opportunity to go out and win it on the field.

This would require 4 rounds of playoffs.
Round 1) Find 8 lesser bowls to host.
Round 2 - quarter-finals) Elevate the Cotton and Gator (?) to host 2 of these 4 games. Rotate the Rose, Fiesta, Sugar, and Orange through the other 2 quarter-final slots.
Round 3 - semi-finals) Rotate the Rose, Fiesta, Sugar, and Orange to host these 2 games.
Round 4 - N.C. game) One of the [Rose, Fiesta, Sugar, Orange] that got stuck with a quarter-final game gets to "double-host" and have the NC game as well.

Ultimately, this would be great for the fans.

But, if politically, only an 8-team playoff will fly at this point, then let's take what we can get, and then build on it. Otherwise we could be stuck with the lousy current BCS situation indefinitely.

There is 11 FBS conferences and Indep's. Create 1 more FBS conference with Indep's and new FBS teams. Then you have a 16 team playoff with 12 champions plus 4 highest ranked
wildcards....

The only way I can see a playoff happening...

The bowls die first. Bowls entail sponsorship for the SCHOOLS with real return. People have to reject them first. Meanwhile, people travel once for these things, not thrice in 3-4 weeks, therefore bowls will not be included in a playoff... the non-market interest in a given school is NOT what you think it is, and bowls are conceived to fill hotels first, stadia, eh, somewhere down there.

Yes, home sites until a neutral-field-site-announced-in-advance national final.

Yes, eight... and that's BCS conference champions and two other conference champions if my sage advice is heeded. This might be from rating, this might be from NCAA paring down FBS, possibly in conjunction with schools in 12-team conferences being moved around into no bigger than 10-team conferences, and I might be wrong and at-large berths are accepted. Maybe they'll jam FBS into 8 neat conferences (and cast out the outliers into FCS).

Why?

Golden Rule- the BCS has the gold. See Division 1 Management Council and Board of Directors representation for proof.

Honor Among Jackals- the BCS conferences will not succumb to a system totally based on seeding or ranking of teams or conferences for ADMISSION to the tournament. They clearly do this for 1 v 2, and that's about it for now- they'll accept tournament seeding, but not the threat of non-participation. The conference championship is the clear indicator of what's been done over the season, the closest approximation to that "loss knocks you out" shtick some people think is the genius of the current system.

It's The TV Economy, Stupid- Any notion that Ball State could possibly get a fair shake needs to acquaint themselves with TV ratings. This is why the MAC is hidden and the SEC is getting multi-billions. As such, viewers are conditioned to not accept less. They don't WANT to see WAC or MAC teams.

Eight Is Enough- Again, this carries over from that "loss knocks you out" mentality. 16 creates about 4 sort-of bye weeks. The current problem with March Madness, AS PERCEIVED BY SCHOOLS AND SPONSORS, is that the regular season is marginalized. A lot of large arenas are not maximizing revenue, and haven't all decade. They can't go back on 65, because of CBS... but the schools suffer at the gate during the season as a result. Football will not subject itself to the same "perceived" mistake.

"I Want ALL The Resources"- Back when I lived in Boise, my source for lots of info was Jeff Caves, generally another radio hack, but pretty good when it came to sports business. That phrase is how he avoided the word "greed" while emphasizing what the big schools were thinking... also to emphasize why downgrading both Idaho and Idaho State could be good for Boise State. They DO think that way- that your dollar could be their dollar. Competition in college athletics for that dollar is WAY more cutthroat than it is in the pro leagues, and given public institutions and large donors and everything else at stake, it's going to remain that way into the foreseeable future.

Sadly, killing the bowls would only happen if a playoff system was forced.

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