Plus One System Gains a New Friend:

Another year of Bowl Championship Series (BCS) selections have been made and another year of discontent with the current system has begun to reign. Every year following the BCS selections, people lament that the system to determine the national champion should be better. There are people that have championed a full sixteen-team playoff and every idea in between, but the alternative to the BCS that seems to be gaining the most traction right now is called the “plus-one playoff.”

The Plus-One model has been discussed for an extended period of time and was actually brought before all of the conference leaders in a vote in 2008, but it did not gain the required amount of votes to pass. Since that vote, college football has changed dramatically and the grumblings of the fans have gotten significantly louder. It is important that the Big 12 commissioner has begun to support the plus-one system, because he had been one of two very staunch critics in the past (the other being the Big 10 commissioner Jim Delaney), because he was afraid it would create a loss of revenue for his conference.

The reason that conference commissioners seem closer to making a change to the plus-one system is due to the situation from this year’s BCS selections. Nobody is disputing LSU’s right to play in the national championship game, but there were 3 one-loss teams waiting right in the wings to play LSU. This is the perfect scenario for a plus one system where all four of these teams would have had an opportunity to play their way into the national championship. Right now all of the athletic directors and conference commissioners, except Jim Delaney, are showing support for the plus one. However, they all keep prefacing the change to a plus one system with the word “eventually,” so it seems that the fans will still have to wait some time before there is a fairer system for choosing who plays in the national championship of college football.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/andy_staples/12/06/plus-one-playoff/index.html

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/football/ncaa/12/07/plus-one-support.ap/index.html?sct=hp_t2_a8&eref=sihp

By: The Sports Guru (Patrick McCullough)