My ideal football system **WARNING: LONG AND POINTLESS**

I'm bored and it's waaaay too long until football season and tomorrow's game is still hours away. So I decided to occupy my time with some ramblings.

My perfect college football world would completely overhaul the system.

First: Division 1A would be pared down to 96 teams. The bottom 23 (as determined by "The Formula" -- see below) would be dropped back to Div. 1AA. Every 4 years, the 6 teams with the lowest average final rating over the last 4 years would be swapped out for the highest 6 1AA teams.

Second: All 96 1A teams would be grouped into 8 12-team conferences, the 6 BCS conferences plus the WAC and the CUSA (or MAC, whichever makes the best geographic sense).

Third: Every team would play ever other team in its conference twice PLUS two teams from each of the other 7 conferences every year; NO 1AA games.

Fourth (and the biggie): There would be one 40 week regular season with 4 open dates. After the regular season, the top 4 rated teams according to The Formula would be seeded 1-4 and have a playoff. There would be an open date before the first round and another before the Championship Game. The bowls would be free to do whatever they want with any of the other 92 teams during the first three weeks. The last week is for the Championship Game only.

Fifth: To help accomodate a 44 week season, the rosters would be expanded to 120 scholarship players per team rather than 85, with up to 40 new scholarships awarded per year rather than 25.

"The Formula": There would be three requirements for the formula. 1) it can only include as factors the actual results of games played on the field: no poll votes, no pre-season rankings, nothing whatsoever subjective in any way; nothing but wins, losses, objective strength of schedule, and perhaps margin of victory. 2) the strength of schedule component must utilize a mathematical formula that accounts for every single game played by every team in the Division (1A for 1A teams, 1AA for 1AA teams) in calculating each team's Strength of Schedule; the math to figure this out is not that complicated and I have enough computing capacity in my cell phone to run the numbers. And 3) whatever the formula is, it must be openly available to all teams, and any changes must be put on a 5 year delay for implementing in order to give every program a full recruiting cycle to adjust to the new rules.

That would be my dream of a college football system. It is laugably unwieldy, nowhere near plausible, probabaly not even possible for a number of reasons I haven't bothered to think of, and if somehow brought to reality would likely have negative consequences far outweighing whatever positives it would bring. But, it's my pipe dream so I don't care.