I think regular season games would still matter with a playoff system. Every NFL game matters right?
Nope; about half the games in the last two weeks are between some combination of teams who are either resting starters for the playoffs or are out of the playoff picture. It's boring, and it's one of the myriad reasons that fantasy football is dumb. Playoff systems reward teams that are good enough to qualify and happen to get hot at the right time; college football rewards season-long consistency. The college football regular season is a playoff; if a team wants to be in the championship game, it cannot lose. It's as insane and unique as March Madness.
They should go to a 16 team playoff system and have another 16 team playoff that acts like an NIT. That way all of the bowls still get their games and some of the bowls will get higher ratings. The only thing the bowls will lose is cherry picking games to bring in extra revenue which is ridiculous anyway.
You're asking teams and fans to travel, potentially, to four different locations in four weeks, each time on a week's notice. This is impossible. The bowl system exists to promote local tourism in the places games are played. If you make a playoff system you would need to abandon the bowl structure altogether and have teams play home games for at least the first two rounds. And to keep things fair, the games would necessarily be played on the same day or two each week (so teams would be playing on approximately the same amount of rest). Lots of these early playoff games would have to be played, then, at the same time; ratings wouldn't necessarily increase.
What might need to happen though is to have two less games before the conference season starts, but those games are normally cake anyway.
Athletic programs make money by playing home games. Reducing that number for every team by one or two to add games for sixteen of the 120 or so teams is not a good idea. I will grant that non-conference games are probably about 50% or so cake; one way to deal with that is to not allow wins against non-Division 1A opponents to count towards bowl eligibility. Another would be to allow the computer polls to one again account for strength of schedule.
A +1 does nothing to combat the fact that 95 percent of colleges have no hope of winning a national championship before even one snap is taken
Again, there are about 120 teams. Do you really think only 6 teams have a chance at the beginning of the season? There are at least 2-3 teams in every major conference who potentially could run the table.
and for 95 percent of fans the bowl season is meaningless. This season has been fun to watch but I could care less about Florida or Oklahoma and I care even less about any other team battling for #3. There just isn't any intrigue in the bowl season for any fan outside of Florida or Oklahoma.
This I completely do not understand at all. Any fan of any school that will be playing in a bowl game would disagree with you.
