A proposal for College Football

The following is a proposal to improve the college football championship.

The key requirements for the proposal focused on:

• Ensure competition determines the champion;
• Eliminate ambiguity in the declared champion;
• Maintain the excitement of the college football regular season;
• Maintain the unique bowl game structure and excitement of college football;
• Maintain each conference's independence.
  

The proposal:

• Implement a 16-team, four-round post-season playoff;
• The teams in the playoffs will consist of each of the 11 conference champions and five wild cards;
• Each conference can name its champion as it chooses (ie. via regular season round-robin play, via two sub-conference champions meeting in a conference champion, etc.);
• The five wild cards will be selected on the basis of ranking in the BCS. A team will be a wild card if it is a. not a conference champion, and b. one of the five highest ranked BCS teams that is not a conference champion;
• The playoffs will be seeded exclusively based on BCS rankings. The highest ranked BCS team will be the #1 seed; the second highest BCS team will be the #2 seed; etc. Conference champions may be seeded lower than non-conference champions;
• The playoffs will be initially scheduled by pairing the #16 seed against the #1 seed, the #15 seed against the #2 seed, etc.; after the first round, the games will be scheduled based on the highest remaining seed playing the lowest remaining seed, the second highest remaining seed playing the second lowest remaining seed, and so on.
  
• Round 1 will be played the first weekend after Thanksgiving; round 2 the next week and round 3 the following week;
• The Championship and a Runner's Up game will be played on New Year's Day;
• The Championship will be between the last two remaining teams. The Runner's Up game will be played between the 3rd and 4th remaining teams;
• Location of Rounds 3 and 4 will be rotated each year between the four BCS bowls (Rose, Fiesta, Sugar, Orange);
• Location of Rounds 1 and 2 will be rotated amongst other bowls;
• Bowls that do not have a scheduled playoff game, may schedule a bowl game between non-playoff teams based on whatever existing agreements may be in place.

Other notes:

• Conferences and teams retain autonomy on conference membership;
• Teams should reduce regular season schedules to 10-11 games to account for additional games at the end of the season;
• All bowl payouts remain the same (ie. a team advancing in the playoffs may collect multiple bowl payouts).

Update 8.7.09: ESPN has their own proposal.

Challenging Paradigms: Browsers and Music

7/3/09 UPDATE: Going back to Firefox today for five reasons. 1. Chrome is failing to bring up many websites that I know are not officially down. I am getting "Oops that page does not exist" multiple times for facebook.com, twitter.com, etc., 2. Chrome has an annoying habit of opening up a new browser when I click the tab. The reason is that it is very easy to drag a tab to reorder them or you can drag it out of the tab row to open a new browser window. What happens is that I am clicking so quickly, I end up dragging it down slightly and it constantly is opening up new windows. Not cool. 3. I still have problems getting certain applications to work correctly in Chrome like flash video players, ajax menus, etc. I click and nothing happens. Not a big deal if it were isolated, but I can't get it to work on properties like Blogger.com which Google owners. Not good. and 4. RSS pages render as gibberish. Not a big deal, but in Firefox, they render RSS pages with a lot different options for subscribing; Chrome does not do that, and 5. I was speaking with a friend last night who recently had a meeting with Mozilla; he mentioned that they were a really cool organization and it reminded me that I agreed and that Firefox just released version 3.5 and I want to try it.

5/13/09 ORIGINAL: Today I am giving Google Chrome another shot at winning my heart over. Last time I used it, I did not like it, but my browsing habits have changed and so I might like it better now. Note, I think the reason I am giving it another shot is their video shorts available on the Chrome YouTube channel. I do not know for sure, but it's pretty much the only reason why Google Chrome has been top of mind for me over the past couple of weeks.

I'm also for the first time giving Pandora a real shot. Last.FM has been my music destination of choice but I want to take my music with me and Pandora offers a mobile app for the Blackberry. Having already parted with the idea of "owning" music files, the next paradigm shift is in tracking music. While Pandora will let me bookmark songs, it does not let me track every song I listen to and how many times I've listened to it. That part is disappointing because when I use Last.FM, I really enjoy looking back at my most listened to tracks because it often is different than what I think it would be. That said, I think I'd rather have portable music... I'll be testing that assumption over the next few weeks.

Post-Script:
Google paid 11 companies $10,000 each to produce a 1-3 minute video about Chrome. They then posted the videos to Youtube to monitor how many times each was watched; the 'winner' is being rolled out into a TV campaign. Here is the video I would've like to see them use for the ad campaign and here is the video which they did convert to a 30-sec spot.

For a single spot, I think they went with the right choice. The spot is easy on the eyes and mesmerizing. For a campaign consisting of multiple ads, I think Defenders in Tights would have created something recognizable in any media format... oh well