Opinion > December 6, 2007

By Jeff Merski | Opinion editor

As the college football regular season concluded in the wee hours of Dec. 2, one thing became apparent – my roommate was in utter delight that his favorite thing in the world had struck the college football universe – chaos.

With many of the top teams in the country losing on Dec. 2, an interesting question was raised. Who exactly should play in the Bowl Championship Series National Championship Game? The list of possibilities was quite lengthy – with teams such as Louisiana State University being considered due to their difficult schedule and two triple-overtime losses, the University of Kansas, who had only one loss but didn’t even make it to their conference championship game or the undefeated University of Hawaii, who has beat two teams that are going to bowl games, but also played two opponents from the inferior Division I Championship Subdivision.

In the end, LSU ended up making the national championship game. That’s not the point of this column though. The point is the need for college football playoffs.

As evidenced by this year, there are several teams that can legitimately claim that they should be competing for the national championship. Unfortuantely, only two of these teams can be selected.

However, if even a four-team playoff was established, that would create a tournament that would decide who is rightfully the national champion.

The only real downside is it’s an extra game for the two teams that advance to the national championship game. Since these games are played over break, student-athletes aren’t sacrificing classroom time to attend these games or practice sessions, and in games of this magnitude, a sponsor will most defiietely chip in enough money to cover any travel costs and have some money left over.

Heck, if it was really desired, we could expand the playoffs to an eight-team field with each BCS conference champion getting an automatic bid, any non-BCS conference team in the Top 12 of the BCS getting an automatic bid and then filling the remaining slots with at-large teams. Again, with the length of winter breaks at colleges around the country, athletes won’t be missing anything related to coursework.

In the end, a playoff system would generate some excitement toward the end of the college football season.

Really, does the PapaJohns.com Bowl or the Roady’s Truck Stop Humanitarian Bowl really excite you all that much?

Sure, there are plenty of exciting other bowl games out there, but if adding a playoff to the postseason picture for the top tier of college football would generate even more buzz, then it’s something that really should get done.

Jeff Merski is a senior political science major from North Andover, Mass.