One of the all-time greatest hits by country music superstar Randy Travis was his 1982 (actually released in 1986).
The Rich Uncle Penny Bagses who run FBS — that's Division I-A college football, for those of you in Rio Linda, West Palm Beach, and Staten Island (or at least it used to be) — might be well advised to revisit 1982 in their bailiwick.
The regular-season standings from that year can be viewed by clicking on this link. Any major college team not found on this page; e.g., Notre Dame and Penn State, was independent in 1982 (indeed, Notre Dame still is).
When a mistake has been made, it is not a sign of "weakness" to admit it, and then correct it.
And as the mistake is corrected, there is no reason why they cannot still further expand the College Football Playoff to 16 teams (and unlike "Final Four," "Sweet 16" is not a registered trademark — of the NCAA or anyone else). Plus 16 out of 129 (the total number of teams in FBS) can hardly be considered not exclusive enough.
As part of going Back to the Future, the following changes would be awesome:
1. Bring back the Southwest Conference. If for no other reason, doing so would increase the number of "power conferences" from four to five, with its champion receiving an automatic bid into the "Sweet 16," along with the other four champions of the "power" conferences. However, no conference champion should be guaranteed a higher seed than every "at-large" team, as a "purist" such as Mike Tomlin would love to see happen.
(Words mean things: Saying "at-large" bears less of the "first loser" connotations that "wild card" does. Just ask Dale Earnhardt, Sr. if he was still alive. I'm sure he would agree.)
2. Force Notre Dame to join the conference of its choice (preferably the Big Ten) and return Oregon State and Washington State to the Pac-12. And if any of these teams don't like it, T.S. — and that doesn't stand for tennis shoes!
3. Cap the number of teams in the same conference at 15, which could be divided into three five-team divisions, with the three division winners plus one wild card team advancing to an innovative conference semifinal playoff (any 15-team conference would play only eight "league games," as Dick Vermeil liked to call them, with each team playing their four division rivals once each and two games each against the other two divisions). Most other conferences would have either 12 or 14 teams (except the revived Southwest Conference, with only nine, unless it chooses to add more teams). All other conferences may, at their option, play either eight or nine "league games."
4. Return as many teams as possible to the conferences in which they played in 1982, with divisions if the number of teams in any conference is 12 or more (remember when former baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn said that "it wouldn't be practical to have a first-place team and a 12th-place team"? What he meant of course is that "it wouldn't be lucrative enough").
The NCAA and its member clubs wanted to make as much money as possible. But there is always more than enough money to go around. The same does not apply to the integrity of the sport — especially a sport played by so-called "student-athletes."
Call what happened this year in college football the New Coke of sports. It's time to bring back the Classic Coke.
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