Football Assn. Proposes 16-Team Playoff

The College Football Assn. has presented a plan to bowl representatives for a 16-team national championship playoff in the early 1990s that could bring participating schools millions of dollars but undermine the present bowl system, a newspaper reported.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said CFA Executive Director Chuck Neinas revealed the plan at a closed meeting with eight bowl representatives in Atlanta Wednesday. Attending the meeting were officials from the Orange, Sugar, Cotton, Holiday, Citrus, Fiesta, Liberty and Peach bowls, the newspaper said.

The CFA is a group of 63 schools that play Division I football, including teams from the Southeastern, Atlantic Coast, Southwest and Big Eight conferences, plus leading independents such as Notre Dame, Penn State and Florida State.

The playoff would exclude the Big Ten and Pacific-10 conferences which have their own television package, the paper said.

Bowl sources said the CFA has been seriously studying a playoff system for the past four months and considered more than 40 plans before deciding on the one revealed Wednesday.

According to the Journal-Constitution, the plan calls for a selection committee similar to the one that picks the field for the NCAA basketball tournament. The committee would pick and seed the 16 teams for the playoffs.

The top eight seeds would host first-round games on the campuses. The four quarterfinal, two semifinal and championship games would be held at current bowl sites yet to be determined and would essentially take the place of those bowls. The championship game, which may be rotated among several bowl sites, would be held on the weekend before the NFL’s Super Bowl.

The CFA will take the plan to its membership at its annual convention June 2-4 in Dallas. If it passes there, the CFA will try to get it on the ballot for the NCAA convention in January.