The month of December is an exciting time for college football. It's filled with conference championships, bowl season, and endless controversy about which four teams made it into the College Football Playoff. Like many other fans, I have problems with the current system and have developed my own theoretical model for the College Football Playoff that’s fair and competitive.

Before we get into that, let's take a look at the current system.

Currently, the ranking of teams is decided by the College Football Committee. The four best teams after conference championship weekend get into the playoff.

Right now, the four best teams are Clemson (1), Oklahoma (2), Georgia (3), and Alabama (4).

This is a big problem for many people across the country because there are no specific criteria for how these teams are ranked by the committee. It’s also difficult to pinpoint “who’s better than who” because many of the teams competing for the playoff rarely matchup against each other and often have the same records.

This means that the committee is judging teams based off of how convincing their wins are and how bad their losses are. For example, all the teams in the playoffs have one loss. The only other one-loss team in the nation competing for the playoff was Wisconsin. They’re ranked 6^th by the committee because their only loss was in their conference championship, and they played in what they see as a weaker conference than the teams in the committee.

I think that’s an awful way to determine the four teams that get to compete for a national title every year.

They got the four best teams, right, but there’s a lot of other good teams that got left out. Teams that could go toe-to-toe with the nation’s top four and beat them any given week. My solution is to expand the playoff to 12 teams with more specific criteria on who gets in.

The first round in my system would be the Conference Championship Round. This would take the Conference Championship games of the Power-5 Conferences (ACC, Big-10, Big-12, Pac-12, Sec) and turn it into the first round of the playoffs. Whoever wins their conference advances. However, this is only 10 teams, not 12.

The last two teams are wild card teams. These are teams that didn’t make it into their conference championship like Alabama did this year or are not part of a Power-5 conference. This lets a team like Notre Dame or Boise State get into the playoff if they have a deserving season. The wild card teams would play each other and the winner advances.

The next round is the College Football Quarterfinals. The committee determines the seeding of the winners from the previous round, just as they already have been doing all season. Seeding didn’t matter in the conference championship, but it does now to determine the matchups.

In this round, there are six teams. If we were to have three games for everyone to play, then we would be left with an odd number of teams for the next round. In order to fix this, the two best teams determined by the committee would receive a bye week.

This is important because it doesn’t take away the competitive nature of the regular season. The committee likes to brag that having four teams makes the regular season the most competitive out of any season in all of sports. My system makes it equally as important to impress the country and do as best as you can to earn a bye week.

If this system was in place, then our two games would be Georgia (3) vs Alabama (4) and Ohio State (5) vs USC (6). Clemson and Oklahoma would get to take the week off and automatically move to the next round.

After that, we get the College Football Semifinals. This looks similar to the current system. The theoretical matchups would be Clemson (1) vs Alabama (4) and Oklahoma (2) vs Ohio State (5). This would then be followed by the National Championship, where the two winners would duke it out.

This system is fairer than the one currently in place. Instead of being graced by 13 members of the committee, teams would have to earn their spots by battling the other powerhouses in the country and winning their conference.

Not only is this fair, but it’s more competitive and entertaining. Who wouldn’t want to see all of these matchups? This is great for the fans and great revenue for the conferences and teams. It would only extend the season by two weeks for those that are worried it’d interfere with the NFL playoffs. (NFL playoff games are scheduled on Saturday because College Football is over). The earlier rounds would have to be scheduled during bowl season if the NCAA still wants to hit that January 8^th Championship date.

I don’t see how that’s a problem. The Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl are already a part of the playoff this year. Just do that with the matchups in the earlier rounds and call them bowl games too. The Cotton Bowl would become part of the playoffs with Ohio State and USC. The same could be done with our theoretical matchup of Georgia and Alabama in the quarterfinals. Then nobody is losing money because a bowl game had to be taken away. Restructuring the bowl season is far easier than dancing around the NFL’s schedule.

Unfortunately, this idea of expanding the College Football Playoffs isn’t even on the table for the committee. The current system was established not too long ago in 2014. The chances of it changing in the near future aren’t too likely. However, it's fun to speculate on a better system, and I’ll do anything I can to bring up the conversation of that happening.