The format cannot be altered significantly until 2011, I believe. And with every commisioner but two shutting it down this year there will need to be some significant change to make it happen.

a college football playoff or flying cars?

I was going to do a bit on this but I’m still buried. Here’s the thing – they won’t have a playoff for a while because it would hurt the regular season. People would recognize the fact that college football has become the NFL and start wondering why they’re bothing to attend all those crappy preseason games (called non-conference right now).

I’m still in the non-playoff crowd, but if the overall scheduling doesn’t get better, we’re going to have to get into a multi-team playoff to see some decent football because what they keep giving us year to year is getting worse. It’s still better than most sports, but this money-hungry environment isn’t going to make it any better, the product will continue to get worse.

Reality of the recession? What university lives in reality? :)

...but nobody in the FCS ever complains about the regular season being meaningless, and I’ve never once heard a college basketball fan, coach, or player say, “Oh, this one doesn’t really matter because we’re in the tournament anyway,” prior to conference rivals tipping off.

Besides, any arguement for “every game counts” went to crap the minute conference championship games were introduced giving multiple-loss teams the chance to take a title away from someone who’d finished undefeated.

While I think that the move to a playoff is possible or even likely, I am still convinced that the Powers that Be will never approve any system where a non-BCS program (excluding Notre Dame) has the possibility to win the title on the field of play. This is going to be a significant stumbling block towards structuring a playoff structure. They have to do it while ensuring that the conferences that they consider to be also-rans are blocked out.

What I suspect will happen is that when a playoff system is finally agreed upon there will be some sort of formal severance between the six BCS conferences with Notre Dame remaining in the “FBS” and the five non-BCS conferences and the independents forming a new division somewhere between “FBS” and “FCS.” Since the creation of the BCS in 1998, this separation is already extant in all but name. If they’re going to have a playoff they’re going to have to strip off the veneer.

Remember that a formal separation would be simply stripping off the appearance that the eleven D-I conferences are treated equally, something that does not exist in reality nor has it in quite some time. There already is a separation in terms of marketing, recruiting and television revenue and if a playoff that deliberately excludes non-BCS conference teams is to even give the appearance of fairness, they have to formalize that separation. If they don’t they have to go through a lot of bizarre hoops to ensure that they don’t get in…hoops that already make the BCS look deliberately biased. That’s what happened with the best non-BCS team since the creation of the BCS (the ‘04 Utes) and it really emphasized the deliberate flaws in the system meant to ensure the supremacy of BCS teams without risking a loss in a game of significance.

As to “damaging the regular season” I can’t see how it would happen. After all, Florida didn’t seem particularly damaged by their cupcake non-conference schedule when they won the title nor have the many who came before them. Championship caliber teams are still going to put mediocre I-AA programs on their schedule and deliberately avoid the best non-BCS and FCS teams (particularly after the Appy State incident). A formal separation isn’t going to change that one whit. Good teams still want the easy wins early in the season to warm up with and they’ll still get them. It would not damage the regular season any more than almost every AD damages it intentionally already.