Face it, there are big bucks. Dilapidated cities with a stadium can host a rousing alumni party for some backwater school with a 6-6 team. Who wouldn’t want to go? As a result, I don’t think that bowl inflation is going away.

My solution is very simple: Make an NCAA rule that madates some sort of round robin scheduling system whereby every team that finishes in the top 30 (or so) in the BCS standings is required to schedule one or two pre-season, non-conference games against schools from the same group. Since games are scheduled in advance it would have to be over a two or three year period.

The result would be that dynasty teams would have to face potential dynasty teams. Alabama can’t simply hang up on Boise State when the Broncos call to schedule a matchup. If good teams are forced to play good teams, then there will be little debate over who is better once the season plays out. I consistantly hear from college football fans that “The entire season is a playoff.” With the current scheduling system, this really is not the case.

You keep everything else in place, but rule out what is in my opinion, the biggest injustice: that schools have the ability to boost their record by playing really crappy teams while also mitigating the risk of hurting their record by playing really good teams.

This comes from spending five years at Vanderbilt–a school which routinely gets off to a great start by absolutely slaughtering sacrificial, non-conference schools and then getting it handed to them once the SEC season starts.

The upshot is that it gives fans more high quality college football games at the beginning of the season. It would become the rough equivilent of the pre-conference tournaments that take place around the holidays during college basketball season and fans wouldn’t have to sit through God-awful anhilitations on national television.

Your setup seems like a workable if not slightly confusing system. My biggest complaint is that conference shifts split old rivalries. If BYU got added to the Pac-12, that would leave Utah in a seperate conference and the true greatness of college sports lies in the tradition and the absolutely murderous rilvaries. Cal/Stanford, Oregon/OSU, Pitt/WVU, OSU/Michigan, Kansas/Mizzou, Auburn/Alabama. You get the idea. It doesn’t always happen, but when two long-time rivals get to square off for a conference championship or bowl berth, that is college football at its finest. Surely they’d keep the “Holy War” matchup, but it wouldn’t be the same if the teams were divided by conference.

Anyway, just thought I’d chime in. It’s good someone is thinking about this issue. I also believe, strongly in fact, that a BCS playoff is among the very few bipartisan policy options that could be implemented at the Federal level. Support for this is so strong that it is one of few remaining pieces of common concensus left in America.

But as for “Option 2″… as a lifelong Big 10 fan I can tell you, I don’t want Notre Dame. At least not permanently. I like Frank Deford’s idea though: rotate them through a different conference each season (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120992481&ft=3&f=2100422).