No one will deny that both of the College Football Playoff semifinal games this season were amazing. Both are instant classics and more than delivered on their share of excitement and drama. Flowers where they’re due. However, it would still be a mistake to let it distract from the fact the CFP system sucks and needs a major makeover. 

Complaining about how Division I football chooses a champion is as old as the sport itself. There’s no denying that the current version of the CFP is better than when a bunch of sportswriter dorks or coaches (who don’t actually watch other games) picked a champ, but the warts on the system alway take up a ton of oxygen. Are the best 4 teams picked? Are they seeded correctly? Are teams outside of the Big 10, ACC and SEC given their due? Are regular season games losing their meaning? Does the CFP encourage scheduling weaker non-conference games? (Looking at you, Alabama…)

The CFP appears to be heading toward a 12-team format, but that isn’t likely to solve most of the problems. The Big 10 and SEC are still going to hold all the power. Regular season games will mean even less, and there’s less reason to schedule meaningful non-conference games. Instead, here’s 3 better proposals for fixing the College Football Playoff.

Hold a Spelling Bee

This seems like a not serious suggestion on the surface. However, we’re not talking about the NFL here. College football players are student athletes, so let’s put the student part of that to the test. Take the captains from every team with a winning record, and make them spell words until you’ve only got 4 left. Those 4 play for a national championship. Skeptics would probably point out that this would give an advantage to noted smart schools like Notre Dame and Stanford, but is that really so bad? Afterall, a graduate from Stanford could go on to a career in nuclear physics, while an Alabama or Georgia alum has a career in the NFL ahead of them. 

 Get Rid of the Conferences

If there is not an appetite for treating student athletes like the scholars they truly are, and an insistence on limiting choosing a national champion to just athletic performance, the next option is drastic change. The past decade has seen a massive shift and consolidation in college conferences. Most of that shift has been driven by schools realigning for football. As a result, conferences that were once determined largely by geography are all over the place. How does Missouri make sense in a Southeastern Conference? Why are schools like Utah and Colorado in a Pac-12 Conference? What the hell is going on with the Big Ten?

Best solution for this nonsense and fixing the playoff problem is just nuke the conferences for football. Instead, divide all 131 FBS teams into 16 divisions. Each team plays each other once and the winner gets a playoff berth. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. No more polls. No more debates about snubs. No more scheduling cupcakes to pad wins. Only thing in the way is the greedy college and conference admins.

Get Rid of the Regular Season

Considering there’s no way the SEC or Big Ten go along with that plan, let’s take it a step further. Playoffs are always the most exciting time of any professional sports season. The added stakes of having your season end if you lose creates instant drama. Why not just skip to that part? Before the CFP, a single loss could, and often would, end a team’s title dreams. Who didn’t love watching a juggernaut Michigan team see their hopes die thanks to some Michigan State kicker every fall? 

With this proposal, all teams would be seeded based on their finish the previous year. From there it’s a 128 team tournament (sorry, 3 teams gotta go) until only one undefeated champion remains. Losing puts a team into a loser bracket where teams play for seeding for next year. For a sport like football, where teams only play 10-12 games a year, this format really makes a lot of sense. It’s also probably the most fair way to award a champion since the only way to win it is to just not lose. 

All 3 of these proposals make more sense than anything the CFP can come up with for actually choosing a champion. However, that’s not really what the CFP is for- it’s about maximizing income for the power 5 conferences and their partners. So instead, gear up for listening to dumb pundits talk about who was or wasn’t snubbed.