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College Football’s Group of Five Needs Own Playoff System Outside of NY6 Bowls

Jason Candle, Toledo,

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There is a pretty slick ad running on national TV regularly that mixes traditional New Year’s Eve music with the message that the four-team college football playoff is not to be missed.

The only thing missing from the promotion is a Group of Five team in the Final Four playoff and that’s why the Group of Five schools need their own. Sure, the BCS throws the G5 a bone and allows one of its teams into a New Year’s Six game, and this year, that team is American Athletic Conference champion Houston, which will be playing Florida State in the Peach Bowl. Yet that bowl has no impact on the national championship and the AAC representative will be the only G5 team among the dozen in the featured bowls. That’s why the G5 has to opt out of the championship part of the bowl series that only seems to invite P5 teams.

The process by which the college football playoff committee decides is rigged so that a G5 team will never get into the championship picture, so the G5 participating in a process that gives them only a crumb slot in a non-championship game like the Peach Bowl should be unacceptable. As it was this season, even if Houston went 13-0, it would not have made the final four teams because its most impressive out-of-conference victories were against middle-of-the-pack Power 5 schools like Vanderbilt, 34-0, and Louisville, 34-31.  Had Temple run the table, it would have been a different story because the Owls had a team which made a NY6 bowl, Notre Dame, on the schedule. The same can be said for Memphis, which beat a Mississippi team (37-24) that handled Alabama. Those two G5 teams stumbled late.

Still, to ask one group of schools to go unbeaten and not guarantee a spot in playoffs is an unreasonable requirement when three of the four P5 teams in the playoff currently have one loss. That’s why the G5 needs to break off and hold its own championship. It should not be hard to get the lower-tier bowls to participate in such a playoff, which would naturally raise the profile of those bowls. If, in the unlikely event a G5 team makes the BCS final four, it can opt out of the G5 title playoffs.

The reward of claiming a G5 national championship trophy surely outweighs the risk of giving up the one NY6 crumb the group currently receives.

Mike Gibson is a featured writer for www.RantSports.com. Follow him on Twitter @papreps , “Like” him on Facebook or add him to your network on Google.

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