Your humble Blog Goliard does much of his finest thinking in the shower, and this particular morning his thoughts turned to college football; in particular, to how one might best protect and improve this finest of collegiate sports. The following would be a good start:

1. The first official poll should be held following the third week of games, and no sooner. This would prevent the experts’ pre-season hunches (e.g. that Michigan is a top-5 team) from outweighing games that are actually played in the opening weeks. The need for pre-season speculation and discussion and prediction can still be filled by any number of unofficial polls.

2. No more games between Division I-A and Division I-AA. If you can’t find an opening-day patsy from among the 120 schools in the Division Formerly Known By A Name Everyone Knew, then either your athletic director is outstandingly incompetent, or you are the patsy and should simply get ready to take your medicine.

3. Every conference should adopt the new Pac 10 model of round-robin play. Forget the divisions and championship games—those gewgaws are strictly for professional leagues. Pare down each conference to ten or eleven teams (sorry, Vanderbilt; but I promise you’ll be happier in the ACC in the end) and have every team play every other team every year. That’s kinda the point of having a conference, y’know. And it would still leave two or three Saturdays free each season for traditional rivals, warm-up patsies, and the occasional intersectional adventure.

4. The BCS national championship game may be kept—even though it sometimes prevents the Pac 10 and Big Ten champions from playing in the Rose Bowl as God intended—so long as two rules are adopted. First, if you’re not a conference champion, you can’t be the national champion. (Why does this even have to be said? I mean, talk about your self-evident truths.) Second, since all sensible persons are agreed that the SEC is the strongest conference, the SEC champion must be invited to the championship game every year, unless there are at least two undefeated teams from BCS conferences, and the winner of the SEC is not one of them.

That’ll do for today; more decrees shall be issued anon.