Back in the old days, before anyone worried about what team was the best, there were no conferences. Then some wise guy said: Hey, how about we get all the big area teams to play each other and the team with the most wins will be the area champ. So they did. Then other areas did the same, which led to the claim: Bet our champ can beat your champ.

So there arose various conferences. One team that I know of was in two conferences. So, if they won both conferences, whom would they play? Later, some idiot decided to make conferences too big. Now every team couldn't play all the other teams. So, probably the same moron said let's split the conference in two. Then we had too many teams playing each other so that the best team from one sub-conference could play the best team from the other sub-conference and we now enjoy tight 70-3 games that end in the third quarter and strange methods of choosing a conference champion between two teams that didn't even play.

There is no truly good solution without having 32 teams go to the playoffs. Here, however, is the simplest solution that the NCAA will ever ignore.

The nation's colleges should be divided into sixteen conferences. These conferences should be done by area. Obviously, USC and Washington would now be in different conferences as would Miami and Virginia Tech. These conferences would play half their games against their own conference and half against whomever they choose (you don't think I want USC to stop playing Notre Dame, do you? Or Texas and Oklahoma?). The only way to make this better would be to have 32 conferences.

We now have the problem of teams not playing all the teams in their conference. That is easily solved. Wes Colley has the perfect rating system for deciding the winners in conferences. Whatever two teams have the highest rating slug it out in a real conference championship.

All that is left is for sixteen conference champions to play each other, logically by area, until there is one team standing. Everyone is happy with the results except for the teams that lost, which nullifies their complaints. That's how they would have done it in the old days.