How "Conference Challenges" Can Eliminate College Football Playoff Controversy

The college football playoff has become one of the marquee sporting events in America since the dawn of it's conception and once the first batch of playoff rankings are released, they are the topic of discussion in American sports. This year, the committee has some tough choices to make after the championship weekend. Do you exclude a one loss Ohio State team in exchange for a one loss potential conference champion in Washington as well as a two loss Big Ten champion? What weight are the conference championship games going to have? Well you can argue Ohio State has had a much more challenging non conference schedule and has beaten three teams in the current top ten while Washington has yet to even play a top ten team but dominated in all games with the exception of their home loss to USC. At this point, depending on the results of championship weekend, there will be a little controversy as to who is in and who is out of the four team college football playoff. Many have suggested a move to make the playoff include eight teams, which I personally find fair and valiant, but that simply won't happen and the solution to this issue lies within a simple non-conference scheduling gimmick used by the greatest sport on the planet, college basketball. 

Early in the season, in every college basketball year, certain power 5 conferences (six if you count the Big East conference which is now exclusively a basketball conference) pair up and make each of their member schools play one team in a rival conference. For example: the Big Ten/ACC challenge consists of pairing a team in each conference play an opponent from the other. In this year's Big Ten/ACC challenge will have games like Duke vs Michigan State, Iowa vs Notre Dame, North Carolina vs Indiana, Purdue vs Louisville, and many others. Each team in these respective conferences are forced to play in these games not just as a money making gimmick, but to be a measuring stick of how these conferences stack up with each other as a whole and to be a resume builder for teams who may be on the bubble to make the NCAA tournament come March. The same could be done for college football. Imagine forcing these power five conference schools who stack their non conference schedules with BS games against FCS schools or scheduling teams like Troy (cough cough Clemson) or teams like Idaho (looking at you Washington). Imagine having a weekend in place that would pit the at large college football playoff teams desperately needing a resume building win with other prospective teams outside the top four looking for the same type of win. This would be like having a "Pac-12/SEC Challenge" that could give a team like Washington a chance to play a team like Florida or LSU to give them a measuring stick as to how they play with high quality competition they normally wouldn't play. Not only do we get this scenario where teams can gain a big time resume building, statement win, but we can finally have an adequate way of comparing these conferences other than using tools like the strength of schedule ranking. And finally, to add to the suspense of this yearly conference challenge, the games won't be played until the last week of October and the teams from each chosen conference to play in specific match ups won't be selected until three weeks beforehand. That way, teams can be chosen based off of their ranking. This might not fix everything, but it could build resumes for teams on the bubble and to put more emphasis on regular season games. it seems to benefit college basketball and I could only imagine what this could do for the sport of college football.

@E_Campbell3