College Football Playoff Solution

Division 1 college football (or FBS as they are now calling it) is the only NCAA sanctioned team sport that does not declare a national champion. The shame of it is that the conferences have pandered to the sponsors and have left the avid college football fan disappointed year after year. The BCS has been a move in the right direction, but it is far from a fair solution to the declaring the national champion. To that, I offer up my solution to college football. Some concessions need to be made on many parties behalf's, but the end product will easily compensate.

So here are my new rules on NCAA college football:
1. Regular season is dropped back down to 11 games. These 11 games shall be played in the 13 weeks between Labor Day and finishing right around Thanksgiving. Using this year as an example, week 1 would be Week of Sept 1st and Week 13 would be week of Nov 24th. The 13 week schedule would allow for 2 bye weeks and also still allow for showcase games on Thursday and Friday nights.
2. All conferences determine their champions using their own means and methods. Conference championship games would be preferable for week 14 (end of Nov or early Dec) Conference champions shall have a format, ie championship game or conference record. The runner-up shall be determined using BCS ranking.
3. The week immediately following the conference championships would be the first week of the playoffs. So here is where I will explain my playoff structure. It shall be a 16 team tournament made up conference champions, followed by conference runner-ups of the 6 major conferences.
This would leave 4 at large berths. Any "non-major" conference champion ranked in the top 20 in the BCS standings would automatically qualify. The remaining berths into the tournament will be placed using BCS ranking taking the top teams to fill the at-large berths.
4. In order to appease the bowl structure, I propose that the 16 team pool be divided into 4 subgroups, each playing into one of the major bowls, Fiesta, Rose, Sugar and Orange. Also, to respect the bowl tie-ins, the conference champion and runner-up for the conferences with tie-ins would playoff in the first round. For example, the Rose Bowl subgroup would have two play-in games with Pac-10 winner vs Big-10 runner up and Pac-10 runner up vs Big 10 winner would be the first round matchups played at the higher seeds home field, and the winners would meet in the Rose Bowl. The winners of the 4 bowls would meet in the national semi-finals being played the weekend of December 29th and eventually playing down to the national championship game which would be played Monday January 7th.
5. This system would allow the season to end at the same time as it is currenly scheduled. All the insignificant bowls can be played around the playoff. Also, they can avoid conflicting with the NFL system.

This is an example of what could have been this year along with my predictions for the national champ