After all, LSU lost twice in 2007 and I, and most others, knew they were going to dominate the one-loss Ohio State. When I mean “deserving,” I mean you take in the total package, which includes strength of schedule. Still, even with a strong schedule, it boils down to winning the games you are dealt. Sometimes, you cannot control your schedule. What you can control is winning games.

(e.g., I am not sure we lose at home to OSU in 2006 if the game is played in November prior to Colt’s injury, but the loss basically ended our hopes for the title before most of the season had even occurred)

Absolutely not true. We had the inside track to go back to the national title before Colt went down against KSU. If we won out, we were in. Period.

That is why I think the conference championship should be the clearest road to getting into the playoff. Every team gears up for their conference and there should be little dispute about the legitimacy of those teams because the rules would be set.

Does this not ignore the things you said I was ignoring, such as strength of schedule? Some conferences are much stronger than others. This much is obvious. To make this idea work similarly to NFL divisions, we’re going to have to blow up the current conferences and start spreading teams around, as well as make everyone operate under the same conference rules (which is not a bad idea).

“Those early season OOC games now have no relevance and in fact are degraded by the current system that only rewards teams who are undefeated or close to it.”

There’s some juice to this, but again this is overstated. Big OOC games are still great for teams to up their resume and are more “forgiveable” if lost. I need only point to 2005 and 2006. In both of those years, Ohio State’s loss and our loss did not knock us out of the national title race at all. Ohio State in ’05 had the misfortune of sharing the season with USC, Texas, and a revitalized Penn State team (whom they lost to), while we got knocked out in 2006 after two straight losses to subpar teams. This argument is more relevant to midmajors, whose only shot at the BCS is to go undefeated.

Furthermore, this argument can backfire; if all that matters is your conference schedule, than laying eggs in these type of games doesn’t mean much. You can go play Florida, USC, Texas, etc., crap the bed, and go back to your bad conference (see Cincy) and still be happy with yourself. How much relevance do big OOC games have now if they have little to no bearing on the season as a whole?

I understand that in some years an unranked team is going to beat a ranked team in a conference championship game and get into the playoffs. To me that is part of the charm of this idea and it continues to drive home the importance of the regular season.

I disagree that his drives home the importance of the regular season at all. It boils down your conference season into ONE game, so if you played like garbage throughout the season but lucked out because you have a bad division/conference, you can still advance. Texas beat both Mizzou and Oklahoma this past season and was clearly one of the top teams in the country. Guess who wasn’t in the Big 12 title game? You really think that drives home the importance of the regular season?

If that team then goes on a run and beats three or four of top 7 (or 11 or 15) teams seeded in front of it, who am I to say they didn’t deserve it. On the flip side I could argue that if a team with an undefeated regular season can’t win three or four more games to win the national championship then the legitimacy of their regular season should be called into question.

This is faulty reasoning. It is of course possible (but highly unlikely, much more so than basketball) that an unranked team could go on such a run, but the question still remains on the idea of exclusion; you don’t make a system with high imaginations on Cinderella stories. You make a system in which you attempt to select the best teams in the final tournament. Furthermore, an undefeated team losing doesn’t mean they weren’t good in the regular season. The Patriots lost the Super Bowl at 18-0. Does that mean they weren’t good all of a sudden? No; they got outplayed in one game. You’re claiming your system makes the regular season more important, but it’s becoming more clear that the opposite is the case.

I don’t think it is possible to have a ranking system that will do what you want it to do. There are too many teams and too much bias. As I said earlier, the best way to ensure you have a credible selection of top teams is to take as many teams as possible.

Define “possible.” In the NFL, it’s over a third of all NFL teams; I’ve yet to hear anyone call for a 40 team tournament. You’re right about one thing; there are a lot of teams. However, that just means we have to do our best when selecting. This even happens in basketball, where an NCAA committee selects the tournaments participants and seeds them. Many people get angry when their team is excluded, but you may notice that there is much less controversy here. Even in your 12 team tournament, I guarantee you in some years there will be one and two loss teams excluded in the tournament. Is that not also a product of so-called bias? The only way your argument will work is if you want to expand to the aforementioned 40 some-odd teams, which I don’t see you going to. You too are arguing for exclusion based on merit, and now we’re back to the ranking system, the strength of different conferences, etc.

Will it always play out that the ‘best’ team going in wins? No. Will it be fun to watch and even more rewarding to win? Damn straight!

I agree it’s not about finding the “best” team; it’s about finding a champion. But even doing so, you have to find a way, with so many teams in such widely different environments, to exclude a great chunk of those teams and try to find who is most deserving. It seems you even agree with that, since you have already discarded the midmajor conferences in your proposed 12 team format.