The following is pure fiction.
I just got out of my time machine and here is what I saw. I traveled to the holiday season of 2016 and 2017. The financial crisis of 2008 is a memory, but we are quickly approaching the next storm as the country and world prepare for the impact of deaths of the baby boomers. A republican is preparing for inauguration day. There was a rather large and deadly earthquake somewhere in the Pacific Rim. But there was one spectacle that reminded me of March and it had nothing to do with Global Warming.
Brackets...yes it was a dream come true...the College Football Champion of 2016 was finally decided by a real playoff. Here is how it worked.
The 16 teams were chosen by each of the 11 FBS conferences having one automatic qualifier with 5 additional at-large bids. In the first round, the higher seeded team hosted the lower seeded team. All eight first-round games were sold out and took place on December 10, 2016. There were two upsets in the first round including a MAC team beating a Pac-10 school out on the coast. The game was the water-cooler talk on Monday...and generated more blogging than the new controversial Secretary of Commerce nominee.
The next weekend provided some consternation for many retailers as two rivals met in a second round game in prime time on December 17 th. One Wal-Mart in a Houston suburb puts a 3-d television at every rfid checkout and at strategic points in the store as a ploy to keep holiday shoppers from leaving to catch the overtime thriller. The other three games that Saturday were nail-biters as well.
The playoff take a week off for Christmas eve, but there is still plenty of college football. The playoffs do not end most traditional bowl games. Sure, the Insight.com bowl and the Humanitarian Bowl and six others are history, but the biggest bowls continue. The Rose Bowl matches the best Big-10 and Pac-10 teams that do not make the playoffs. The Orange, Fiesta, Sugar and Cotton bowls have their games as well. Of course, since New Years Day, 2017 is a Sunday, most of these games take place on January 2 as Sunday is left to the NFL playoffs.
The NCAA playoffs begin again on New Years Eve. These are the semi-finals. The games are played in New Orleans and Glendale, Arizona. One of the final four teams is from a mid-major conference and comes a dropped "Hail-Mary" away from the championship.
The championship game on January 7, 2017 at Dolphin Stadium in Florida and features a team from the SEC conference vs a team from the Big XII conference. Many pundits comment about the irony of a championship between the same two teams that would have played for the championship if the BCS had been allowed to continue. The debate about weather or not the playoffs were a good idea ends when the network that covers the championship announces that the advertising revenue for the 15 playoff games is more than the projected revenue for the coming Super Bowl. Somewhere in Peoria, someone pays a holiday credit card bill with his office pool winnings.
The president in the inauguration speech uses the playoff as a metaphor for his new economic stimulus plan stating..."this plan makes as much sense as a college football playoff, but people are too afraid to break tradition for something that in the long run is much better."
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