Let me be honest. As I sat at the bar Saturday night, stunned upright on my stool as #2 West Virginia lost to Pitt and #1 Missouri lost to Oklahoma, I knew that this was coming. I know that Ohio State would crawl out of the ashes of their schedule of patsies and pretenders to play a team vastly superior to them in the BCS title game. And so it was. The Bayou Bengals of LSU have tossed Les Miles’ gigantic brass balls into their team wheelbarrow and are set to make their way down the road to trounce Jim Tressel’s Buckeyes.

Never mind that, according to the Sagarin rankings (you know it’s serious when I pull out a rankings system that 99% of the public is not aware of), Ohio State has the 60th toughest schedule this season, compared to LSU’s 21st-ranked schedule. Never mind that they’ve been idle for the past couple of weeks, waiting like a vulture for the carnage of the conference title games to lay bloody at their feet. They totally deserve to play in the title game over, say Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, USC, and yes, even undefeated Hawai’i.

It’s not as if the rest of the bowl selections were much better, either. After cutting through the fancy graphics and utter Chris Michaels-ness of Fox Sports’ THREE HOUR LONG BOWL SELECTION SPECIAL (which was totally warranted, of course), I retired to my kitchen, looking to stick my head in the oven. Thankfully, Sara was making a pan of brownies, so I just devoured that in a vain attempt to rid my mind of the insane inanity that is the BCS.

See, I’ve been one of the millions of college football fans calling for a playoff system. For years now, I’ve watched the BCS computer apply their mysterious calculations to the very uncalculated world of college football, and screamed that there has to be a better way. I mean, there’s no way that Missouri should beat Kansas head-to-head, win their division and yet be denied a BCS bowl game while the Jayhawks are free to saunter into Miami to play in the Orange Bowl against a Virginia Tech team that will tear them limb from limb. And that’s just one example.

A playoff would fix all of this. It doesn’t even have to be a rigid, impartial system, since I know that college football loves it’s polls and “rankings.” Here’s how we fix all of this:

Step 1: Expand the Big East, Big Ten and Pac 10 to 12 teams each. You don’t even have to change the names of the conferences, if you don’t want. (the Big Ten has 11 teams already. Yes, really.)

Step 2: Implement a championship game for each of these conferences (conferences need to have 12 teams to hold a championship game under current NCAA rules). The winners of each major conference championship game gets an automatic bid to the playoffs. This means that the SEC, Big East, ACC, Big Ten, Pac 10 and Big 12 will give us 6 undisputed champions to start with.

Step 3: Take 3 at-large teams from the remaining minor conferences and independants (WAC, Mountain West, MAC, Conference USA and Independents- essentially, Notre Dame, if they haven’t been absorbed into the Big Ten) These will be decided on by rankings at the end of the season. The highest-ranked remaining team makes it in, while the second and third face off in a play-in game, with the winner joining the 8-team playoff pool.

Step 4: Divvy up the undercard bowls among the remaining teams not involved in the playoff, ensuring the viability of the Papajohns.com Bowl, the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl and the Meineke Car Care Bowl. These are very important advertising tools and should not be discarded.

Step 5: After a two-week bye, start the first round of the playoffs, seeding the teams according to their final ranking in the polls. This means that there is a fair playing field for the at-large teams that finished highly ranked and helps to make sure that the regular season is still very important, thus not turning college football into NFL-lite. Each playoff game will be played at one of the traditional bowls not already assigned to the teams outside of the eight playoff teams.

Step 6: The playoff would culminate in the final two teams playing in one of the five main bowls (which one exactly would rotate every year, as it does now), with the other four already having been host to playoff games, thus keeping them relevant. The End.

See, it’s not so hard to make sense of all this. Division II, III and even the FCS (formerly Division I-AA) all do it, it’s time that Division I steps up to the 21st century. I’m not saying that it has to be through the system that I’ve just laid out (even though it makes perfect sense), it just needs to happen, finally.