This season of utter wackiness illustrates one simple thing - we need a freakin' playoff, and we need it now.

The concept of a 16-team playoff system isn't new - I remember an SI article back when I was a kid that laid out such a playoff using bowl games.  Of course, whenever you bring up the idea to college football purists/greedy universities, they all shut down debate with the same tired arguments.

-Kids would play too many games.

-A playoff would interfere with finals.

-Fans wouldn't travel.

-It wouldn't generate as much revenue.

-The regular season would be undermined.

(And so on and so on.  In fact, most of these "arguments" are laid out at the Football Bowl Association's website, where the old canards are trotted out like hard, fast unflinching facts.)

A year ago, when Rutgers was on the verge of doing the unthinkable and contending for a BCS title game berth they likely wouldn't have gotten even if they'd ran the table, I felt it was time to actually come up with a workable plan.  And no, not the CFN plan or the Dan Wetzel plan - rather, a plan that actually tried to meet the objections of that Big 10 dude head-on.

So I dug deep into my year and a half as a product manager where I had to write business cases, and out popped out a proposal for a 16-team playoff that, quite frankly, is eminently workable except for the fact that major conferences would actually have to, you know, win games in order to get major cuts of the revenue pie.

I won't get into all of the details here, but check out realcollegefootballplayoff.com and/or email me at realcollegefootballplayoff@yahoo.com for more details. It hasn't been updated in a little while (I haven't made a 2007 bracket yet) but the premise still holds as much, if not more, value now.