You are going to run into a problem...
Politics.
As soon as a plan like this takes place, the courts will be filled with law suits because this plan cuts off the VAST majority of college programs from a lot of money. The G5 schools alone out number all of the P5 schools. Tossing in the conference of the left out P5 will be at least ten additional schools and as many as 14. Plus, Notre Dame will make a huge stink over it.
A playoff system that provides a path for at least in principle for every college football team in Division 1 is the only forward. They make up 5 Power conferences and 5 Group conferences with the handful of Indy schools forming an 11th - sort of.
Most people using any logic want to see the conference championship games used as the first round of a play off. How would that work? It is going to be cumbersome at best.
The first thing to consider is does Notre Dame and the other Indy schools warrant an automatic slot? I would say they do not. They should be able to earn one, but again, how would that be done?
The other ten conferences all have some form of a conference championship game. That provides ten winners but it also means comparing a P5 champ the same as a CUSA, MWC, MAC, American or Sun Belt champion. That is going to be a lot of heated debate.
You can't just allow each of the G5 into the mix either, those schools have a much smaller budget and earn a lot less money for advertisers, seeing half of the pool dropped on these schools is a bad monetary set up.
The only way to limit that is to limit their representation. Using a polling method is heavily flawed because ESPN runs polls and who they say is #10 is who the nation says is #10. They will make sure who gets in and who does not. In this case, it is going to have to be the highest ranked G5 after the CCGs are played regardless of the actual rank. They could be #1 (unlikely) or #25 (scary), but whatever their rank is all Notre Dame has to be in the pool is ranked at least 1 spot higher. Some years that might be a tough ranking and others, a pretty easy one.
At this point you have 6 of 8 teams if Notre Dame fails to get in and 7 of 8 if they do. The last 1 or 2 slots as the case may be would be filled with the 2 highest ranked teams not taken in the pool to this point.
The next round would be home field for teams 1, 2, 3, and 4. The 8th ranked team would play at 1, 7 at 2, 6 and 3 and 5 at 4. Remember that teams 7 or 8 are at large highest ranked teams, not Notre Dame if in or the G5 school. The G5 school is #6 and if Notre Dame is in they would be #7.
This years field would look like this with the first 4 teams being the home field:
1 vs 8: #1 LSU vs #5 Georgia (an unfortunate rematch 7 days later)
2 vs 7: #2 Ohio State vs #14 Notre Dame
3 vs 6: #3 Clemson vs #18 Boise State
4 vs 5: #4 Oklahoma vs #7 Oregon
The winners would face each other as 1 vs 4 and 2 vs 3 with those winners in the Championship.
It is a popular past time to produce these schemes and no one is going to be happy with whatever is selected, but this set up avoids all of the major negatives of most of them. Notre Dame has a path as do the G5 and they are not facing the top ranked teams that would be the at large teams.
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In response to this post by HOO86)
Posted: 12/13/2019 at 10:22PM