Daily Skiff

Just like most Americans, my Thanksgiving break from school and work was full of the three F's: family, food and football.

After spending quality time with my family over some amazing food, I watched some terrible football.

Seriously, why are the Detroit Lions in the NFL?

In light of the bad football on TV, I decided to get together with some of my buddies from high school to play our own football.

After I made a first-down catch, my friend Garrett punched me square in the mouth while forcing me out of bounds.

With a busted lip, and being a little woozy, I stood there for a second, collected my thoughts and got back into the game.

I wasn't mad at him; in fact I am glad he did it. I accidentally broke his thumb in a game a couple years ago so that makes us closer to even. But it may have also knocked some sense into me about college football.

Later that night, I was thinking about the BCS and how the University of Texas is going to be left out of the Big 12 Championship Game and I devised a new way to make this college football BCS rankings versus playoff debate a little easier.

There are 120 teams in the NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision, divided up into 11 conferences, with an extra four teams recognized as independents.

Why don't we just have 10 conferences with 12 teams each?

I know there is a lot of money that goes into the current conferences, but that same money can easily go to these new conferences.

With 12 teams in a conference, every division gets a championship game and with those championship games comes an easy playoff format with the 10 conference champions.

Take the 10 champions and rank them by win-loss record. Any ties will be resolved by in-conference records and then head-to-head match ups, if there is one, then record against similar opponents.

If there are still ties, use points allowed in conference play and if there is somehow still a tie, use points allowed overall. After that, it will come down to a coin flip.

The top six teams will get byes into the second round of the playoffs, while teams seven through 10 play two play-in games: No. 7 vs. No. 10 and No. 8 vs. No. 9. After those two games, we will have the top eight teams, and that will lead to a perfect eight-team playoff.

These playoff games can be played at the current BCS bowls for the most part.

For example, the two play-in games can be played in the Cotton Bowl, the only non-BCS bowl on the list.

The Sugar and Fiesta Bowls can be used for the quarterfinals. The Rose Bowl can be used for the semifinals and the Orange Bowl can be used for the national title game.

Of course these can be rotated every year and there can still be the million other bowl games.

My friend Ryan and I took the time to map out the 10 new conferences, thus showing how boring Waxahachie is and proving that something can be done to change the system.

All the conferences were based solely on region and what makes traveling the easiest, or at least made the most sense, for all 12 teams.

We put TCU in the western division of what we called the "Tex-Mex" conference, featuring all 10 Football Bowl Subdivision teams from Texas and the two from New Mexico. The west has TCU, Texas Tech, Baylor, UTEP, New Mexico and New Mexico State. The east has Texas, Houston, Rice, UNT, SMU and Texas A&M.

So is this what the future of college football will look like? Probably not, but it's just something else to think about.

Sports editor Billy Wessels is a senior news-editorial journalism major from Waxahachie.

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