Here's one chaotic scenario that could lead to College Football Playoff expansion

Paul Hoolahan announced his retirement as CEO of the Sugar Bowl earlier this month. He’d been on the job for 22 years.

In a press release announcing it, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby called him “an integral part of the college football landscape.” ACC commissioner John Swofford hailed his “incredible standard of excellence.” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said “Hoolahan has served as a great steward of this revered bowl game.”

Hoolahan is a nice person and a good businessman. Nothing against him here. And all of the above platitudes are accurate. He was all of those things.

Yet his retirement press release should have been full of compliments flowing the other way. Hoolahan should have been thanking all those commissioners for continuing to nonsensically outsource to bowl games the most valuable property in college athletics — the football playoff. It’s how he and his peers have made millions.

I am in favor of expansion of the playoffs if:

1: Eliminate the Conference Championship games. This is to reduce the wear and tear of the players. Also rid of the phony idea the winning a conference matters when one has unbalanced schedules. If for some reason, Northweastern was to win the Big 10 = 14 I am sorry a team with at least 4 losses should not be in the playoff. Also, choosing conference champions means non-conference games have zero meaning so for the SEC 1/3 of the schedule does not matter and for other conferences 1/4 of the schedule does not matter. 2: The committee would select all the teams with guaranteed bids for 1 team from each conference and 1 Group of 5. I want the best team from each conferences not some phony conference champion, i.e., example of Northwestern. 3: First round games at home field of higher rank team. Reward for year long excellence and save on travel costs for fans.

Here’s a very simple solution:

1. A nine team championship playoff between the conference champions of the SEC, ACC Big 10, Big 12, PAC 12, and the top four CFB ranked teams that are not a conference champion.

2. The two lowest CFB ranked teams of the nine play the second (or third) Saturday of December, and the winner advances to the final eight, who are seeded based upon CFB rank.

3. The next Saturday, seed 1 plays 8, 2 plays 7, 3 plays 6, and 4 plays 4.

4. On the following Saturday or New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day (which ever is later) the semi-finalists play.

5. The national championship is played on or about January 7, as it is now.

I would also consider ending the regular season one week earlier to give the players recovery time, either by cutting one game from the regular season and/or starting the season one week earlier.

12 is plenty. 38 is far too many, there is a huge difference between the top 1 and everyone else, the top 6 and everyone else, the top 12 and everyone else. 38 vs. 1 would be worse than the crummy games this weekend, the best of which is Clemson/Syracuse.

12 teams, with the top 4 having a first round bye, is a good format, and includes anyone who has any chance of competing for the championship. You could include a UCF in that format. There will always be fights over someone excluded who thinks they are better than someone who was in the top 12, but no one cares about 12 vs 13, those teams won’t win anyway. That gives 4 games on two successive weekends, then 2 then 1. That’s 11 games. The first two weekends should be played at the home of the higher seed. That will make it fun. After that, play at a neutral site, as happens now with the 4 team playoff.

4 weeks of playoffs to decide a champ. Eliminate all the dead time in December. Perfect for the networks. Lots of money will be generated, and some of that should go to the players. (But that’s another subject).

What's gonna change the playoff is the fact that Bama wins it half the time. People outside of Alabama can't stand it.

It's the reason the BCS was changed into the playoff (Bama winning 3 BCS championships within a 4 year period).

It's the reason the AP poll started putting their final poll after bowl games (Bama in Bear's day would win the AP poll, then lose the bowl game because it was meaningless).

It's the reason the AP poll was created in 1936 (when Bama was winning half the Rose Bowls -- the game that was supposed to be the champion of the east vs. the champion of the west).

The details and logistics of how the championship is determined doesn't matter. What matters is the motive: anything to stop Bama's dominance.

I would make the following changes:

No more games between FBS and FCS teams.

Assign two random non-conference games each season between teams of similar strength based on the previous season’s ranking.

Expand the playoffs to 7 teams, with 5 winners of the Power Five Conference championship games (which now in essence makes them playoff games), plus two at-large teams.

Seed the teams accordingly:

1st and 2nd seeds get a bye

Second Week of December: 6th and 7th seeds play each other, with the winner playing the 3rd seed

Third Week of December: Quarterfinals (3rd seed vs 6/7 seed winner, and 4th seed vs 5th)

New Years’ Day: Semi-Finals

January 8: National Championship

The committee would select all the teams with guaranteed bids for 1 team from each conference and 1 Group of 5.

Eight teams. One team per conference; no runners-up. The television marketing consortia that now call themselves "conferences" would have to split up and realign into real conferences that could actually play a real round robin, with the team with the best record as the champion. We would revert to a system resembling the lineup 30 or 40 years ago, when conferences were built out of mostly similar institutions that enjoyed natural rivalries. The Big Ten, SEC, ACC, Big Eight, Pac 10, etc. made sense. The eight playoff spots would consist of five or maybe six automatic bids to the winners of the power conferences with the remainder going to the best of the rest -- i.e., outstanding teams from minor conferences and independents.

It would also help to deemphasize tournaments entirely. A true champion is settled in fair competition. Since strength of schedule cannot be equalized across conferences, fair competition only exists at the conference level, where round robin play is possible. A single elimination tournament will indeed produce a champion, but the champion is frequently NOT the best team. This is why tournaments engender such excitement; everybody gets a crack at upsetting the king, and there's enough parity that upsets happen regularly.

If we want a true champion in a national tournament, we would have to play the tournament NBA/NHL/MLB style, with best of seven or best of five series. We can't do that in football.

How often does the "best" team win in the NCAA men's basketball tournament? Someone will go into the tournament ranked number 1 on the regular season. There will probably be at least two or three teams that have a good beer and pretzels argument that they should be #1: we lost a game when we had two guys out sick; our conference was loaded this year while yours was down, so we took an extra hit; in Game X, the refs got us in early foul trouble or we got two bad calls down the stretch; we had a fluke game where the basketball gods nailed the basket shut, or an opponent was hitting 3's from Mars; we had a bunch of freshmen who were uneven early in the year but we were a monster team by the end of the season. Etc., etc. And these may be good arguments.

But the reality is that someone has to be #1 going into the tournament. That team has a bullseye on its back. To win, it has to win six straight games, of which the first may be a gimme but then it's five in a row against teams that can beat you, and a couple that can play you straight up even. No one is perfect six games in a row. To win, a team has to be both very good and lucky at the right time; even the best team will probably have to dodge a bullet or two.

A football playoff is no different. The tournament champ is often not the best team. A looming example: the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team is the best in the world. It's ranked #1 and deserves to be based on strength of schedule and record. It will be one of the favorites next summer in the World Cup. It can't take the group stage for granted, and there is a pat formula for a top team failing to play through. This happens to someone every World Cup. But assuming the USWNT reaches the knockout stage, it will have to win four games in a row against four teams that are perfectly capable on any given day of knocking them off. Let's say they are 70/30 favorites in each of those games. For four games in a row, that works out to a 24% chance of playing through and repeating as World Cup champion. That sounds about right. But Germany, France, England and Australia aren't far behind, and another half a dozen teams could get lucky.

This year's Alabama team looks pretty good, but the same logic applies. I'd say their odds of winning three in a row against top ten opponents is less than 50 percent.

"In the 21 Rose Bowls prior to 1936, Alabama won 3: 1926, 1931, and 1935. 1/7 does not equal 1/2."

Bama won 3 Rose Bowls and tied 1 within a 10 year span (1926, 1927, 1931, 1935). So almost half. I didn't mean Alabama had won half of all Rose Bowls up to that time (22 of them from 1902 to 1936 -- the 1936 Rose Bowl being the end of the 1935 season). But half of the ones within the narrow time span leading up to why the AP poll was started. So I was wrong by a little -- it was almost half (4 out of the prior 10).

It's similar to the BCS. No one at the end of the 2012 season (after the 2013 BCS championship game) said, "Well, Bama's not really dominating the BCS. Bama has won only 3 of all 15 of 'em." Far from it. All anybody could talk about was that Bama had won 3 of the past 4 (2009, 2011, & 2012). That's the main argument that led the BCS folks to announce that 2013 would be the last year of the BCS to make way for a playoff in 2014.

I argue that 8 decades ago sports writers were having the same conversations of Bama fatigue in the then recent Rose Bowl games. So when Charles Sherman had his personal poll after the 1935 season, a year that Bama won the Rose Bowl yet again (the 1936 bowl), the rest of the sportswriters decided to go with his idea for rankings the next year and determine the champion without the Rose Bowl. Thus, the AP poll began in 1936.

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