A Playoff System Proposal

How the playoff would work:

• There are 11 Division 1A (FBS) conferences.  The 5 conference champions ranked highest would get automatic bids.  The winners of the other 6 conferences would play 1 head-to-head matchup with another conference champion (6/11, 7/10, 8/9) for the other 3 spots in the 8 team playoff.  (Note: The current BCS formula could be used to seed the 11 conference winners.)
  
• The conference championships and play-in games would be settled by the 2nd week of December.  The playoff would start with the round of 8 on the 3rd week, the semi-finals in the 4th week, and the championship game on or around Jan. 1 (or the first week of January).
  
• If any of the independents want to be in the playoff, they can join a conference like the other teams.  Or Notre Dame could be in as long as they finish, say, top 6.  Whatever.  This could be ironed out in negotiations.
  
• Seasons would go back to the regular 11 games (that was standard for decades up until recently), meaning the longest season would be 16 games (11 games, a conference championship, a play-in game, and 3 playoff games).  Only 8 teams would play 14 games or more (which many teams play regularly now).
  
• This system would give all 120 D-1A teams an equal chance, it would produce far more money than the current system does (the small bowl games could be kept as the football version of the NIT that they basically are now), and it would provide for December Saturdays full of classic games and occasionally, monumental upsets.

Using the guidelines above, this year's playoff would feature these 11 teams, with the following seeds (extended BCS rank in parentheses); thanks, Rich Tellshow:

1) Ohio State (1)
2) LSU (2)
3) Virginia Tech (3)
4) Oklahoma (4)
5) USC (7)
6) West Virginia (9)
7) Hawaii (10)
8) BYU (17)
9) Central Florida (36)
10) Florida Atlantic (64)
11) Central Michigan (65)

  Given the seeds above, this is how the 2007 playoff bracket would look: