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8 team playoff use the BCS poll to determine who gets in. Top 8 every year no exceptions.

This will never happen though, because of the money. A playoff completely kills the 40 other .com bowls which no one watches except the fans of those teams and not even all of them. But a playoff probably would not generate as much money.

I would absolutely love it but football is that one sport where you cant play everyday. Then, the season is either going in to late January to early February or they will move the schedule up to mid-August.

Sweet Idea but it would take too long and there would probaly be a bigger risk of someone ruining their NFL career because there will be a greater risk of injury.

I like the idea, but there is to much tradition and money involved in bowl games. If there was a way to structure the bowl games into a playoff series of lets say, the top 16 teams in the BCS rankings. The current format is retarded. Ohio State sat for 3 months before playing in the national title game, there is plenty of time to complete a playoff series in that span of time and still have the final game when it is being played now.

I would go with the top 6 ranked teams entering a playoff with the top two teams getting a week off and then play the winners. And then the rest of the top 25 can play their meaningless bowl games. I also would get rid of the one month or so long waiting period until the National Championship.

Cross posted from another thread:
Even if there were a playoff, it would probably be conference champions + wildcards. Given that there are 6 BCS conferences (unless they shuffled the conferences around with a playoff) you'd probably still see a number of SEC (and Big Ten and Big 12 and PAC 10) teams locked out. A 3 week playoff with 8 teams seems to be the largest you can insert into the last two weeks of December / first week of January, and would allow for 2 wildcard teams (not sure how you'd pick them, use BCS at large rankings?).

Even with a playoff, unless the field were massive (16 teams) there's still a high probability of excluding a highly ranked team. For example Florida won the SEC and Arkansas was runner up, but LSU was ranked over Arkansas in the BCS. Such a system (using the two highest BCS ranked teams that failed to win their conference) would then have to exclude Arkansas for LSU (since LSU was higher ranked) even though Arkansas won the SEC West.

The bottom line is that although a playoff would be superior to the current system, there's no perfect playoff system. The scheduling constraints of football (1 game each week) preclude a massive field (such as used in the NCAA basketball tournament) due to the length of time it would take to complete the tournament. Unless the NCAA shortened the regular season and forced each conference to play a championship game (11 games + championship game) in order to allow a 4th game for the playoff, the playoff would by necessity be limited to 8 teams (and therefore exclude some good teams).