The college football system is failing. This season ended with possibly the worst bowl season in history. In my mind there are two main issues. One is the playoff committee being complete garbage. There is nothing that you could ever say that would convince me that they left Iowa ranked ahead of us for any other reason than thinking it would be nice to give the little guy a chance to play in the Rose Bowl. You will also never convince me that Stanford's win over a trash USC team was so impressive that it warranted jumping a two loss team over us in the rankings. The true issue, however, was caused by conference expansion.

In my opinion conference expansion has watered down schedules resulting in teams being unproven at the end of the year playing in bowl games they have no business being in. With 14 team conferences and an 8 team conference schedule, how can you crown a conference champion when they haven't played 5 of the teams they are considered champions over? This is exactly why Iowa, a solid but not great team, was able to finish the season ranked #5. In the regular season Iowa managed to avoid playing Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, Rutgers, and MSU (although they did play and lose to them in the championship). Iowa was the best example this year, but I believe that many other teams benefited by playing weaker schedules allowing them to go into the postseason being overrated and taking the place of a better team.

So how can the problem be fixed? 14 team conferences are unfortunately here to stay. It would be beyond wrong for the conference to kick teams out, and they would never want to in the first place because of the money they'd lose. My solution involves three different parts that would need to be set in place.

1. Increase the number of in conference games per season to ten, and make it mandatory that one of the two non-conference games are against a power five opponent. This way there are only three teams in conference that you do not play. 

2. Get rid the conference divisions. I know people complained about the fact that the old way of deciding conference champions was bad because it left co-champions and used tie breakers, but nobody seems to realize that that same system is still being used within the divisions. Ohio State and Michigan State were technically both B1G East champs, but Michigan State held the tie breaker and nobody seemed to have a problem with that. Eliminating divisions also makes it so you can play the other in conference teams more frequently. I don't know about you but I don't feel any need to play Rutgers, Maryland, and Indiana every single year, and by being chained to these teams we miss out on the chance to play the other teams in the west division as often as we could.

3. Modify conference championship week. As of right now the teams that play in the conference championship games play a 13 game season while everyone else plays 12 and is forced to sit at home while the other teams get the advantage of proving themselves for one more week. My idea is that without conference divisions we can use the conference standings to create an entire schedule of week 13 matchups. Have 1 vs 2, 3 vs 4, 5 vs 6, 7 vs 8, 9 vs 10, 11 vs 12, and 13 vs 14. This would create a week of football with great matchup, and also provide another week to weed out the  pretenders. Some of the games might be rematches, but if not then it would mean playing 11 of the 13 other teams in your conference.