re: Should college football just do away with bowl games and expand the playoff?

I'll have to dust off the notes, but I put something out quite a while back that would give us both a better playoff AND keep the bowls. Some of the things that were required to change to make it work have changed, like making Notre Dame join a conference and making all of the power 5 conferences play a conference championship game. With that said, it broke down like this:

- 7 Bowls designated as "playoff" bowls
- Keep traditional Bowl tie-ins (to some degree)
- Power 5 conference champs get automatic bids
- Highest ranked non-power 5 team gets a bid
- 2 at large
- Bowls set by ranking

There would be a bowl rotation similar to what they have now with the bowls rotating to host the semis and the NCG. The 4 bowls not hosting would be the first round that would get us to the final 4. Proposed Bowls would be:

Rose Bowl
Sugar Bowl
Peach Bowl (Chick-Fil-A)
Fiesta Bowl
Cotton Bowl
Orange Bowl
Highest Bidder (Probably Capital One or Sun Bowl)

First round would be played New Years Day, semis the weekend after and the NCG 2 weeks after that.

There are more details, but this accomplishes a number of things. It keeps 7 bowls extremely relevant. Some of the other bowls should also benefit by being played during the holidays leading up to the playoff bowls. Having at large teams and seeding keeps the regular season relevant because those last 2 teams in will be selected the same way that the current 4 teams are. It also keeps teams from having to play a lot of extra games. All of these teams would have played a bowl game anyway. At most, the 4 teams who advance will play one more game than they would have in the current system.