It’s probably fitting that in the craziest year of NCAA Football I can remember, the LSU Tigers travel 90 miles down I-10 to win the National Championship in a stadium wiped out 2 years ago and in a city that’s used to double or triple Baton’s Rouge’s population.

And I won’t go on a total rant here, but hasn’t this college football season finally convinced everyone that SOMETHING has to be done.  Among my 4 or 5 solutions, here’s the one I think would be a breeze to pull off.

• All conference champs need to be decided by the weekend after Thanksgiving.  This year, that was Dec 1.
• Dec 8, the 6 real conference champs and 2 wildcards play. I don’t even care how you seed them.
• On Jan 1, you have 2 bowl games with the final 4 teams
• On Jan 8, you have your National Championship. 

This accomplishes several things:

• If you are a conference that is scared your 2nd best team may sneak out a win in a conference championship game and eliminate your strongest contender, well then don’t play a championship game.
• If BYU goes 12-0, they might get a Dec 8 bid.
• If someone dominates all year and loses a heatbreaker in Week 12, they can still get a wildcard birth.
• If you schedule two top teams early, and lose, but then run the table in your conference, you can still win.  

There are better options, but this one seems so dang easy to implement, I don’t know why you wouldn’t do it as a replacement to the ludicrous system that only satsifes people who work at the NCAA. 

So here is what that would have looked like this year:

Dec 8 – Some combination of USC (Pac 10), Oklahoma (Big 12 upset winner), Ohio State (Big 10), LSU (SEC), West Virginia (Big East), Virginia Tech (ACC), and some combination of Kansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Hawaii and Georgia.  

So, your Dec 8 could have been: Ohio State (1) vs West Virginia (9); LSU (2) vs Missouri (6) or Kansas (8); Virginia Tech (3) vs USC (7); Oklahoma (4) vs Georgia (5).  Now that would have been a fun Saturday of football.   

But anyway, congrats to LSU.  Geaux Tigers.