College Football Needs a Playoff System

The current (non-playoff) system is flawed because:
1) Only one of the bowl games is meaningful--the BCS championship game. All the other bowl games are mostly meaningless in terms of determining who's #1. In the prior system (pre-BCS), the winner of any of the top-notch bowl games often had a chance at the title. There was all the excitement of players and fans chanting "we're #1"--hopefully--after winning a major bowl game.
　
The very term BCS--Bowl Championship Series--is a misnomer. There is no "series"--just 4 meaningless games and one championship game. So at the very least it's deceptive advertising
　
2) The notion that the current system is the best way to accurately determine the best team in the country is an illusion. Many years there are about half-a-dozen teams from major conferences with zero or one loss. And it's rare that there are exactly two unbeaten teams from major conferences. Yet that's the only scenario in which you can fairly claim that the BCS title game in the present system can settle anything definitively: a match-up of the two and only two unbeatens.
　
Any time you get two one-loss teams meeting in the BCS title game in the current system, most of the other teams that finish with one loss (presumably after winning a bowl game) have a legitimate beef, particularly if they're the team who beat the title game winner earlier in the year.
　
Even when a one-loss team beats a previously unbeaten team in the current BCS title game, other one-loss teams that weren't on the previously unbeaten team's schedule can claim that they would have beaten them, too, if given the opportunity, particularly if they're the one who beat the title game winner earlier in the year.
　
Basically, the only way for the BCS title game--without a playoff system--to produce a reasonably undisputed winner is for there to be one and only one undefeated team at the end. The odds of that are fairly low---probably less than 20%.

For a couple of novel ideas for implementing a playoff system, go to this blog on 1/8/10.