College Football Playoff first round showed system is broken. Fixing it isn't that difficult

They want a bold and beautiful Ferrari, a sleek machine humming into the new frontier of college football.

They’ve stuck it with a 1972 VW Bug engine, hesitating and hiccupping through Turn 1 of the new College Football Playoff.

“It’s the first year, and we’ll be able to step back and take a look at everything soon enough,” said Ohio State athletics director Ross Bjork.

We don’t have to wait for those who run the CFP – the reactionary revolutionists that they are – to figure out what’s wrong with the new 12-team format. It’s not that difficult to comprehend.

When the two losers of the championship games of the two strongest conferences in the sport are given an easier playoff path than the champions of those conferences, it’s time to change.

When three teams (Indiana, SMU, Tennessee) who didn’t deserve to be in the field got in and were summarily blown out in first-round games, it’s time to change.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Hayes Plan to fix the Ferrari:

— Eliminate top seeds for automatic qualifiers.

— Reseed after the first round.

— And for the love of all things pigskin, strength of schedule must be heavily weighted in the selection process.

Think about this lunacy: Indiana, SMU and Tennessee combined to beat one team ranked in the final playoff top 25. They also combined to win 31 other games of inconsequence.

No. 1 Oregon beat No. 4 Penn State in the Big Ten championship game, and No. 2 Georgia beat No. 3 Texas in the SEC championship game, yet the bracket – my lord, stop trying to force “bracket” branding on all things college sports – spit out these quarterfinal gems: Oregon playing No. 6 Ohio State and Penn State playing No. 9 Boise State, plus Georgia playing No. 5 Notre Dame and Texas playing No. 12 Arizona State.

I think I can speak for the rational among us when I say, what in the It’s-Time-To-Bring-Back-the-BCS is going on here?

I refuse to believe that intelligent, resourceful and well-meaning men and women in collegiate sports signed off on a playoff structure so flawed, it makes seven computer dorks holed up in their homes while poring over their rankings – with their own “secret” formula of quartiles and variations – look like the preferred process of selecting postseason teams.

HIGHS AND LOWS: Winners and losers of the playoff's first round

CALM DOWN: College Football Playoff blowouts shouldn't inspire anger

Or that those same well-intentioned men and women watch the NFL – you know, the sport/structure college football is desperately trying to recreate – and its playoff, and thought, yeah, the whole reseeding thing is dumb. Let’s not reward regular-season success and leave it all to chance!

All in the name of bracket branding.

You’ve got to be kidding me. We have to be better than this, everyone.

There’s too much money at stake (an estimated $800 million annually now, and possibly $1.2 billion beginning in 2026) for the leaders of college football to run through this willy-nilly, hoping everything will work in the end.

Remember that nonsense from years gone by? Remember when the Bowl Championship Series formula (see: computer dorks) was this unique mathematical formula, one that Joe Sixpack wouldn’t understand?

Trust us, everything will work out in the end, they said. The two teams that should be playing in the national title game will be playing in the national title game.

Forget that those seven computer polls, which combined accounted for one-third of the process (the Harris and AP polls were the other two-thirds), had wildly different polls throughout the season — only to strangely and conveniently have nearly identical results (with different computer formulas) by the end of the season.

So we can go back to that, or we can simply decide that strength of schedule means something. You can’t play one team with a winning record, and have a non-conference schedule of Florida International, Western Illinois and Charlotte, and expect to be taken seriously in any future playoff poll.

You can’t win a big rivalry game (Tennessee over Alabama) in late October, then play one difficult game the remainder of the season (and get blown out) and punch your ticket to the show.

After Tennessee’s win over Alabama, the Vols played Kentucky (4-8), Mississippi State (2-10), Georgia (loss), Texas-El Paso (3-9) and Vanderbilt (6-6). That has to play a role in the selection process – it just has to – when there was nothing else of significance in the first half of the season.

If you’re going to blister Indiana for its schedule, you can’t give Tennessee a pass just because it plays in the Ess Eee See.

It’s a simple fix, really. The college basketball tournament uses quad wins, where a team’s wins and losses are placed into quads of importance. Quad 1 wins and losses are the most important, and quads 2 and 3 are less significant wins and weigh heavier as losses.

In other words, strength of schedule is everything. That doesn’t mean the basketball committee doesn’t miss annually with a few of the choices, it just means there are defined metrics with little room for nuance.

You know, the insufferable nuance of “they can only play who’s on the schedule.” If that’s your argument for inclusion, every unbeaten Group of Five conference championship over the years got hosed, too.

“I’ve been on both the basketball and football committees, and believe me, there’s a lot going on in those rooms,” said Oklahoma athletics director Joe Castiglione. “I don’t say that negatively, I say it coming from a point of a lot of people trying to do the right thing. But yes, certainly we can always look for ways to make anything better.”

Here it is, America. The Hayes Plan.

Learn it, love it, use it.

That Ferrari will be humming along in no time.

Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X at @MattHayesCFB.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: College Football Playoff is broken. Fixing isn't that difficult