How can Soccer Improve College Football? Part 1

Everybody is talking about how we can fix the mess in collage football known as the BCS, including President Obama.  Generally speaking, unless your favorite team is in the BCS title game you dislike the system.

The Europeans have an interesting system in place for the Champions League tournament (as do other European "football" championships and cups).  The Champions League takes the best soccer club teams from each country's league and determines the champion of Europe.

Here is how it works:

76 teams from the 52 European soccer associations participate.  The better quality leagues (as determined by a statistical system) send more teams.  So the tournament is made up of the following:

Leagues 1-3 send their top four teams (12 teams)

Leagues 4-6 send their top three teams (9 teams)

Leagues 7-15 send their top two teams (18 teams)

Leagues 16-52 send their top one team (37 teams)

The tournament follows an interesting format and begins with three qualifying rounds.

Qualifying Round 1: The teams ranked 49-76 (lowest ranked) are randomly paired off into 14 match-ups.  Each pair play two games against one another - one game at each team's home venue.  The combined score, aggregate, determines the winner.  If a tie exists after the 2nd game, tie-breakers are used to determine the winner.  The 14 winners move on to the next round.

Qualifying Round 2: The teams ranked 35-48 and the 14 round 1 winners are randomly paired off into a new group of matches.  The winners are determined just as they are in round 1.  The 14 winners move on.

Qualifying Round 3: The teams ranked 17-34 (18 teams) are mixed with the 14 teams that qualified past round 2.  This creates 16 games and 16 teams to move on to the Group Stage.  The winners are again determined by an aggregate score.

Group Stage: This stage is made up of the 16 round 3 winners and the top 16 teams in the tournament (teams 1-16).  The teams are split into eight groups of four teams.  These teams play "round robbing" and the top two teams from each group advance to the first knockout round.  Each team in a group plays everyone else in their group twice.

The rest of the tournament follows a typical structure.  The teams are paired off in a bracket and then move to the quarter-finals, semi-finals, and finals.  All rounds are aggregate, except the finals.

So, a long story short, all teams get a shot.  This is true regardless of which league they are from or how "good" that league is relative to the other leagues.  The catch is that the lesser leagues have a longer road to travel and do not send as many teams.  If we use this model for NCAA Division 1 football (bowl championship division), I think we have something interesting.  The powerhouse conferences (SEC and BIG 12) would send more teams followed by the BIG 10 and PAC 10.  The mid-majors would send a couple followed by the smaller conference such as the Sun Belt Conference.  And, if a school is "too good" for a conference, we can award them the Notre Dame trophy of excellence and give them an NBC television contract.

See my next post for a "prototype" of this concept applied to college football.