Playoff vs. BCS? No comparison ...

Another college football season, and another deserving team gets screwed out of a spot in the Bowl Championship Series. Remember a few years ago when an undefeated Auburn squad got left out of the title-game party, with USC and Oklahoma getting the honors?

This year, the offended include Texas, which has just one loss — on a last-second play at Texas Tech, another in a string of ranked opponents — and beat the Oklahoma team (on a neutral field, no less) that will play Florida for the national championship.

President-elect Barack Obama is pushing for an eight-team playoff, but the best solution is a 16-team tournament, just as the NCAA and NAIA provide for in their other divisions. This is how it works:

The six BCS leagues get automatic bids for their conference champions:

Big East ... Cincinnati
ACC ... Virginia Tech
SEC ... Florida
Big 10 ... Penn State
Big 12 ... Oklahoma
Pac-10 ... USC

Then there are two other bids for the two highest-rated conference champions from the smaller Division I leagues (MAC, Sun Belt, Conference USA, Mountain West, WAC) — those go to Boise State and Utah.

To round out the field, take eight at-large teams, using the BCS rankings — Texas, Alabama, Texas Tech, Ohio State, TCU, Oklahoma State, Georgia Tech and Georgia.

Then seed the field, 1 through 16, using the BCS system:

1. Oklahoma
2. Florida
3. Texas
4. Alabama
5. USC
6. Utah
7. Texas Tech
8. Penn State
9. Boise State
10. Ohio State
11. TCU
12. Cincinnati
13. Oklahoma State
14. Georgia Tech
15. Georgia
16. Virginia Tech

Then pair them off by seed — 1 vs. 16, 2 vs. 15, etc. The problem is that this gives us a couple of first-round matchups of conference teams that have already played each other (Florida vs. Georgia, Utah vs. TCU), so we're going to adjust the pairings a bit. So we end up with a bracket that looks like this:

1-16 ... Oklahoma vs. Virginia Tech
8-9 ... Penn State vs. Boise State
4-13 ... Alabama vs. Oklahoma State
5-11 ... USC vs. TCU
2-14 ... Florida vs. Georgia Tech
7-10 ... Texas Tech vs. Ohio State
3-15 ... Texas vs. Georgia
6-12 ... Utah vs. Cincinnati

The first-round games would be played this coming weekend, with the quarterfinals on the weekend of Dec. 19-21. We could take a week off between Christmas and New Year's, with the semifinals in the first full week of January and the national championship game sometime after that.

Schools are out of session, so players wouldn't be missing class time, with the possible exception of the two teams that reach the national championship game.

Best of all, the national champion would be decided on the field, which is where it should be decided.

As for the bowl games, incorporate them into the playoff. Pick the best seven bowl games and rotate them in the quarterfinals, semifinals and finals. Use eight other bowls to host first-round games, and the rest can accommodate the teams that don't make the NCAA tournament. That way, even coaches that don't make it to the tournament can still tell recruits they played in a bowl game.