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Now my bracket results obviously will differ from yours, but please pay more attention to how the system works, and not the teams I chosen to advance.  YOUR PICKS, WILL OBVIOUSLY DIFFER FROM MINE, but just like the March Madness affair, we all fill out our brackets and hope for the best, but invariably, when we take our hopes and dreams from a printed piece of paper to the actual playing field, our brackets quickly fall apart. 

According to my results given the bracketed match-ups above, my conference championship match-ups for week number ten of the 2007 season would have looked like the following on the Winners Bracket side of the BCS Bracket.

This side of the bracket follows the traditional chronological flow that exemplifies the normal playoff bracket.  However, on the losers side of the bracket the teams would enter a regional pool where  proximity would determine the match-ups, after the Conference SOP stipulation is addressed.  Therefore the regional pool match-ups would look like the following for the losers side of the bracket which could be quickly determined within hours of completion after the week number nine match-ups have been completed.

If we utilize the Conference Match-up SOP, we can quickly take Kansas and Texas from the Big-12, and Tennessee and Auburn from the SEC out of the regional pools because these match-ups did not occur as part of the 8 game conference schedule in the 2007 regular season example.  When utilizing the results of the actual 2007 season for this hypothetical model, you can see how this outside-the-box mindset would begin to clear up this rebuttal.

Given the above semantics, we are left with the following match-ups on the losers side of the BCS Bracket in our mock BCS Busters Model.  Remember, this all takes place in November, the critical juncture of the season, but it upholds the “sacred cow” concept of the regular season as the conference finish determines which bracket you are in, which determines the bowl hierarchy (BCS, upper tier or lower tier). 

According to Pat Forde, the popular ESPN College Football analyst and BCS expert, the BCS can never get it right, for a variety of reasons.  In his expert opinion, these are the reasons why the BCS can’t get it right:

1. ★   “Did the BCS get it right?  ABSOLUTELY NOT, it is incapable of getting it right.”
   

1. ★    “The BCS is a guessing game trying to decide between a bunch of teams with similar records who have played totally dissimilar schedules and have come at this thing from different directions.”
   

1. ★    “It is a beauty contest between who has the better NAME and FAME, not who has the better GAME!”
   

1. ★    “It is a terrible system that once again failed!”
   

The BCS Busters Model addresses his specific concern, yet enhances the process of aligning the teams in a bracketed playoff so the fans can attend.  Consider the following match-ups on the losers side of the Week #10 brackets.

Boise State @ Oregon State

Arizona State @ New Mexico

Miami (OH) @ Michigan

Clemson @ South Florida

Virginia @ UCONN

By Conference SOP Rule:

Kansas @ Texas

Tennessee @ Auburn

This arrangement leaves one odd-ball match-up (out of region) as Houston would travel to Wisconsin, which completely destroys the argument behind the myth that the fans would not be able to attend in a playoff format since they are traveling large distances from week to week. 

Yes, the Houston - Wisconsin match-up would be difficult for fans to attend, but it is the only contest of the eight on this side of the bracket in this particular week that would be unfriendly for the fans.  Is an argument that applies 12% of the time really the huge hurdle that it is portrayed by the administrators who govern the game?

As a matter of fact, throughout the remainder of this article, one over-riding concept will begin to stand out and assert itself.  This fan “flip-flopping” travel restraint as it pertains to the playoff argument will only ring true 12 - to - 25 percent of the time from week-to-week within the BCS Busters Model.

For Example, in 32 games, within the first two weeks of bracket play, in the most important bracket (The BCS Bracket), there is only 1 game out of 32 where the participants would be traveling over 1000 miles. 

In addition, this situation drastically improves within the “Holiday,” “NIT,” and “Eddie Robinson Sportsman’s Bracket,” due to the fact that we are utilizing this regional pooling and cross regional pooling formats exclusively in these brackets. 

Therefore, we could conclude that there will only be 3-5 games, out of the 120 available competitions within the first two weeks of bracket play, where the participants will be traveling a distance over 1000 miles.  This shreds this ill conceived excuse which often prevents and shutters the wind behind the playoff proposals.

This irrational argument preventing a playoff in college football is completely blown to bits when you realize that the games themselves are played on the home sites of the participants, not within the bowl platform where the bowl games themselves would not only lose their significance, but would quickly become financially insolvent, because the fans would not be able to attend.  This popular playoff concept (using the bowls as playoff sites), which is running rampant around the blogsphere, is a financial train wreck waiting to happen.

The BCS Busters Model solves this bowl dilemma as the bracketed playoff occurs in the regular season on the college campuses of the universities themselves.  The entire regular season and bowl platform is enhanced in the process, yet it saves the traditional rivalries between Florida - Florida State, South Carolina - Clemson or USC - Notre Dame at the same time via regional and cross regional pooling.  

Let’s not quit here, for we can really squash this argument once and for all when analyzing the big picture.

The Eastern, Mid-Western and Southeastern brackets have a major advantage with this methodology but this is due to geography since most of the population base, including the number of schools, reside within this geographic location. 

The schools in the west are always going to be faced with the travel limitation irregardless of the playoff system utilized, whether it be the current BCS model or any other, including the Plus-One concept, or an 8-to 16-team NFL loser out model.  It is simply a given.  The following graphic demonstrates my point.

If you draw a vertical line extending just east of Boulder, Colorado, which would extend north to the Canadian border and south to the Mexican border, you can clearly see that only 28 of the 120 Division I-A schools reside in this geographic location. 

This is exactly why we are using the regional pooling concept on the losers side of the brackets and furthermore, it is why we can apply it to the winners side of the brackets once the pre-set regional formatting begins to skew as we enter the latter stages (Week #12) of the brackets. 

Ideally, when I set up this format, I calculated that the teams that make up college footballs most elite division (the bowl subdivision) would play 8 conference games, two-to-three regional contests outside of their own conference (depending on the Conference SOP stipulation), and one long distance cross country contest of significant distance.

If you think about it, you quickly realize that even with months or years of preparation in the current model, when a team like Oregon travels to Michigan, as occurred this past 2007 season, the Ducks most likely only brought three-to-five thousand fans.  This number wouldn’t change if you had seven days, seven months or seven years to prepare. 

If you disagree, consider that in 2005, given the damaging affects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf coast states, the season opening game, originally scheduled in Baton Rouge, was moved to Tempe on Tuesday morning of game week.  The NCAA and Arizona State went into action, and sold 75,000 tickets in four days, and split the profits with LSU.

Now, this was a significant travel dilemma, but what if it was Virginia Tech versus Auburn, South Florida versus Tennessee or Arizona State playing Colorado.  Would this really be the hurdle of significance that it is portrayed to be?  The BCS Busters Model does not have contests with significant travel limitations the majority of the time.  Between Week #9 and #11, the travel limitations are only occurring 12-25 percent of the time, and in Week #12, the designated week for cross-country match-ups does the travel limitations even apply, since we need this cross pollination to produce the crop needed for national acceptance of the BCS enigma?

If Arizona State can completely sell out for a seasoning opening game in 2005, wouldn’t Ohio State completely sell out for a Week #12 match-up with Oklahoma, with both the winner and loser moving on to a BCS Bowl?  Would USC and West Virginia not do the same?  Regional and cross regional pooling, similar to the POD arrangement in the March Madness Model with the sport of basketball is the answer to this oft used rebuttal. 

The reality of this scenario is the fact that this is exactly what has been occurring in college football for over a century.  Nothing changes with the BCS Busters system in place, other than it eliminates the controversy by creating head-to-head match-ups with teams of similar stature, which creates precision when determining the bowl match-ups at the end of the season.

To counter the words of Pat Forde, the teams with similar records would be on a collision course, playing similar schedules and headed in the same direction.  The fogginess as pertaining to the BCS Model would quickly dissolve and fade away with the winds of change created by the out-of-box model.

The beauty of using regional pooling is we can also apply this to the winners side of the BCS Bracket within the final two weeks of the regular season to minimize travel constraints as well.  If we follow the traditional chronological flow of the winners side of the BCS Bracket like we did in weeks number nine and ten we would get the following match-ups heading into the Elite 8 showdowns.

If we look at the Week 11 match-ups on the winners side of the bracket you can begin to see why I have included this regional pooling concept.  Without the regional pooling concept in place we would get the following match-ups.

West Virginia @ Ohio State

Virginia Tech @ LSU

USC @ Oklahoma

Hawaii @ Central Florida

This creates unfriendly match-ups for the fans 50% of the time, which would be unacceptable considering the financial considerations.

If we utilized the regional pooling concept, we could create match-ups that would be fan and student-athlete friendly, not to mention the fact that the networks would be slobbering over these regular season title tilts.

As we can see, some of the regions cross over into others.  Following the traditional chronological flow above (dark black font) gives us some extremely harsh situations for fans and student athletes to endure, and following the regional pooling above (within the tables) doesn’t completely solve this criterion either.  So we need to cross pool the participants due to the distance involved, and this solves the situation for all of the teams.

Hawaii @ USC

West Virginia @ Ohio State

LSU @ Oklahoma

Virginia Tech @ Central Florida

As I mentioned before, the west coast teams are limited due to geography, but USC versus Hawaii makes much more sense than Hawaii versus Central Florida and USC versus Oklahoma.  By taking regional pooling to yet another outside-the-box mastermind level of thinking, we once again create only 1 competition in week number eleven where the “flip-flopping” fans traveling constraint even comes into play (Virginia Tech vs Central Florida). 

Of course, Hawaii is a given.  It doesn’t matter what system we use, they are traveling regardless, so we can omit them from the argument altogether.

Let’s move on to the Winners consolation bracket where, similarly, we have the following problematic match-up considerations to overcome, according to chronological flow:

Cincinnati @ Illinois

Georgia @ Boston College

Missouri @ BYU

100. C.Michigan @ Tulsa
     

Now lets utilize regional pooling once again to see if we need to cross pool and reorganize.

Immediately we recognize that the Midwestern Pool within this bracket is overloaded with teams.  The match-ups here would take priority as Missouri and Illinois are border states as are Central Michigan and Cincinnati.  That leaves BYU, Tulsa, Georgia and Boston College.  However, we could improve the lot by creating the following competitions:

Cincinnati @ Illinois

Tulsa @ Missouri

Central Michigan @ Boston College

BYU @ Georgia

Once again, we have virtually created only one difficult cross country contest while the other 75% of the match-ups are regional affairs.  It should be noted that these regional non-conference rivalries have continued to take place throughout the course of the last century in college football, well into the BCS era.  Nothing of significance alters the course of tradition in college football.

Lets move on to the Week #11 Winners side of the Losers bracket side of the BCS Bracket (now there is an oxymoron if I have ever heard one).  Traditional chronological flow would provide us with the following match-ups:

South Florida - Wisconsin

Auburn - Virginia

ASU - Texas

Oregon State - Michigan

Now, this would never work because it plays right into the hands of the Administrative godfathers of the BCS who never look outside the box to eliminate the fan and student-athlete quagmire that a traditional playoff format fails to consider.  I am sure you also recognized that a number of the pairings occurring as part of the traditional chronological flow of the brackets are not regionalized at all.

If we went with these match-ups, then the argument that fans wouldn’t be able to attend certainly applies.  But once again, when we think a little outside the box, we can overcome this oft used rebuttal.

Let’s utilize the regional pooling concept once again.