Executive director Bill Hancock (right) expects four teams in the playoff for at least 12 years. (AP)

By Zac Ellis

The newly named College Football Playoff might be the next big step in the sport, but many hope the upcoming postseason model will one day expand to include even more teams. It might be a while before that happens, though.

On Thursday at the BCS Meetings in Pasadena, Calif., executive director Bill Hancock said the playoff will remain at four teams for at least the duration of the 12-year deal, which goes into effect after the 2014 season.

Hancock: "We know people are going to want eight [teams], and some are going to want 16, or 32. But it’s going to be four, for 12 years."—
Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) April 25, 2013

The current plan will pit four teams, as chosen by a selection committee, in two semifinal bowl games to earn a berth in the new College Football Championship Game, which replaces the BCS National Championship Game. The first title game in the new playoff format will take place at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas on Jan. 12, 2015.

Count us still decidedly in favor of having Lee Corso make all playoff-related decisions from the back of a giant rubber duck. (ESPN)

By Holly Anderson

Conference commissioners are convening in Pasadena today to begin working on the mechanics of the latest iteration of the BCS. Their tasks at hand include:

• Selecting three bowls to join the six-game semifinal sites pool. It is nigh impossible, at this point, to imagine any games other than the Fiesta, Cotton and Chick-fil-A joining the Rose, Sugar and Orange. Intrigue likelihood: minimal.

• Selecting the site of the first national title game under the new system. It’s Arlington. Everybody knows it’s Arlington, even though it’s polite to not act like it’s a foregone conclusion, and we’re all going to Jerry Jones Space Camp in January 2015. If all the items on the commissioners’ to-do list get knocked out this fast they’ll be bellying up at Pie’n Burger by noon.

• Selecting the selection committee.  With respect, we believe we have already attended to this matter in a thorough and fair fashion.

• Naming the new contraption. Said Bill Hancock to the AP: ”It will be simple. It will not be cutesy. And it will be descriptive. I’ve seen too many people make mistakes by trying to be cutesy.” (Hear what he thought, but did not say.)

A prohibition of cutesiness knocks off our first naming suggestion of “Bunny Cuddling Snuggletyme,” but we have more. Cast your votes after the jump for a new BCS handle that would require only minimal alterations to everyone’s embroidered rolling suitcases and company blazers:

Read More…

Did the path to the title game just get easier or harder for the next generation of TCUs and Boise States? We’ll find out. (SI)

You have hopefully by now read the big-picture college football playoff columns by our colleagues Andy Staples and Stewart Mandel, and have at least some grasp of what our sport will be facing in terms of a postseason in two years’ time. While on Monday we said we’d be hearing more from the presidential oversight committee than a straight-up approval of the commissioners’ proposed four-team playoff plan, in essence, that’s about all we have to go on at the moment. Logistical hurdles such as the specifics of the bowl rotations, which bowls will even be doing the rotating, the selection of the selection committee, revenue sharing and criteria for admission to the postseason will loom ever larger over the next two seasons.

But here, our thoughts went immediately to what the big picture will look like for some of college football’s smaller programs. No conference has secured guaranteed money or bids. And who even knows what the mid-major conference alignments will be in 2014? As with most issues regarding would-be buster teams in the postseason, we won’t really know until it happens. We won’t know until we get there how an undefeated Louisiana Tech might play against a one-loss Virginia Tech in the eyes of the committee. We still might never find out how a matchup like that might play out on the field. But talk radio be praised, we’ve got two years now to bitch about it. And from here, all we can see are already solid truths getting truthier.

The idea that there’s a be-all, end-all solution to a game with this many moving parts operating on such disparate collections of resources is profoundly goofy, but for the aspiring Boises and TCUs of seasons to come, there is but one solution still, after all this dithering: Win. Win again. Then again. Repeat.

Read More…

Notre Dame’s Rev. John Jenkins is one of 12 university presidents on the current oversight committee. (ZUMAPRESS.com)

• What’s all this, then? The BCS presidential oversight committee convenes in Washington today to deliberate college football playoff plans proposed by the conference commissioners last week.

• The what, now? There are a lot of moving decision-making parts controlling the college football postseason; the BCS doesn’t actually begin and end with Bill Hancock (even though he gets to say all the fun stuff). From the organization’s mission statement: “The conference commissioners and the Notre Dame athletics director make decisions regarding all BCS issues, in consultation with an athletics directors advisory group and subject to the approval of a presidential oversight committee whose members represent all 120 Football Bowl Subdivision programs.”

• So who’s in charge here? Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger is the ACC’s rep and chairman of the committee.

• Anything special we need to know about him? According to Virginia Tech, Steger “has been asked by the Swiss Ambassador to the United States and The World Bank to serve on a committee to establish a foundation in the United States to conduct research on mitigating global natural disasters.”

Read More…

Bobby Bowden wants to be on college football’s playoff selection committee, but is he ready to take part in the butt-dialing trials? (US PRESSWIRE)

Asks Mr. Matt Hayes of the Sporting News:” Don’t want to be Mr. Conspiracy, but who chooses this playoff selection committee? Conflicts of interest everywhere.” Answereth we: reality show!*

But much as we’d like to make this process a straight-up ripoff of ABC’s Wipeout, or ESPN’s own greatest television product of all time, Battle of the Gridiron Stars, Bobby Bowden wants in on this thing, and so does Phil Fulmer. Physical prowess is an important attribute of any successful playoff selector, but no one  should be able to muscle his or her way onto the committee. To that end, we have composed a wide-ranging list of events in six categories that should showcase each aspirant’s strengths in areas vital to choosing college football’s four finest teams:

Feats of speed

• The Chase. Combatants will compete in three timed obstacle course routes while piloting a college football coach’s most necessary vehicles: a golf cart, a jetski and a rented Escalade.

Feats of technology

• Butt-dialing. Combatants will compose sonnets on subjects of their own choosing, on a BlackBerry residing in the back pocket of their pleated Dockers. No touching of the BlackBerry is allowed.

• DO YOU GUYS KNOW HOW TO POST VIDEOS TO FACEBOOK? Lightning sudden-death elimination round, delivered in the form of a yes or no question.

Read More…