Football Playoff?

I am OK with a 4-team college football playoff as a step in the right direction, as long as the following concessions are made.

1.  Only conference champions are selected into the playoff.  This year that would have been LSU, Oklahoma State, Oregon and Wisconsin.  Given the way LSU played in the National Championship game, people may argue this point, but since Alabama could only score 6 points on LSU earlier this year, the Tigers deserved to be there even if they did not play very well once they got there.  I suspect that Oklahoma State would have been the National Champion this year in this scenario.

2.  The championship game is played no later than the Saturday following New Years Day.  The semi-finals can be played the Saturday following Christmas.  Of course, that is one of the new bowl certification requirements. Some teams will not be able to play in the Las Vegas, New Mexico, Poinsettia, Potato and other early bowls if school finishes late.

3.  That four bowls be un-certified.  I vote for New Mexico, Beef O' Brady's, New Orleans and BBVA Compass Bowl.

BTW--It looks like the Beef 'O' Brady's bowl will bite the dust as it has not met the 3-year rolling 25,000 attendance average requirement.  This year's bowl needed to sell 26,190 tickets to this year's game to meet that requirement, and only managed to sell 20,072.  The 3-year rolling average attendance in this bowl has fallen to 22,765.  There is a moratorium on new bowls games, so there will be at least one fewer bowl games next season.  Since we had one team with a losing record in this year's bowls, this will be a good thing.

Also--teams will have to meet academic progress requirements in 2012 in order to be bowl eligible, even if they have a winning record.  But the final rules are pending.  Most of the other requirements for bowls to remain active under the new rules are pending and require the bowl sponsoring organizations to undergo annual audits to avoid another Fiesta Bowl fiasco.