BCS - A better method

So, here's my little rant about the BCS system.  Basically, most conferences already have a pod system.  For example, the Pac-12 divides the conference into North and South.  And they're planning on having a conference championship game.  Why can't we all just play as though we're in one big conference?  Here's the math:

There are currently 11 conferences in Division I-A football:

• ACC
• Big 12 (which currently has 10 teams)
• Big Ten (which currently has 12.  Ironic, isn't it?)
• Big East
• Conference USA
• Mid-American
• Mountain West
• Pac-12
• SEC
• Sun Belt
• WAC

Suppose that each conference was treated as a pod.  Conference winners get invited to the tournament I'm instituting.

For a good tournament, you would need 16 teams.  The five remaining teams would be the five highest ranked teams that hadn't been invited to the tournament yet.  So, if you think it's unfair to have to win a conference, or if you're BYU, Notre Dame, Army, or Navy, just rank higher than everybody else and you won't have to worry about it.

A 16-team tournament would require 4 rounds.  We're going to keep the last round on New Year's Day.  That puts the first round this year on the week of December 10th.  That's the first week after regular season play.  Four weeks later, you have this awesome game, that would end up rotating between the traditional four BCS bowl games, just to keep them happy.  This year it would be played in the Louisana Superdome.  I would call it the 2012 Allstate Sugar Bowl.  Of the other three bowls, two would be the semi-final games the week before, and the third would be played between the two teams from the final four that didn't make it into the final game.

Alternatively, we could possibly have the semi-final games played on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, with the final on January 2nd, as has been done in the past.  That would give teams an extra week after the regular season to do whatever they want.  Probably practice, if they're going to the tournament.

Also notice that this doesn't eliminate all of the other bowl games in the country.  You can still have one, but your conference champions won't be there, since they're playing in my tournament.  If one of your bowl game spots was guaranteed to a conference champion, you get one of the quarter-final, or first round games, depending on how "important" that conference was.

So, I'll be posting my tournament layout and handing out my own championships.  The inaugural 2012 Glen K Thurston Award for Excellence in Football (GKTAEF) goes to the team that wins my tournament.  That causes a few problems because the teams probably won't actually play in my tournament.  So, I'll hand it out based on the following method.  If the teams happened to really play each other, I'll use the real scores, regardless of when the game was played.  If they didn't really play each other, I'll either use an online poll, or some other method of figuring out who would win.  Check out the tab at the top of the page for the bracket.