College Football Playoff is broken. Fixing isn’t that difficult -

They want a bold and beautiful Ferrari, a sleek machine that pushes the new frontiers of college football.

They stuck it to a 1972 VW Bug engine, hesitating and stumbling through the first round of a new college football game.

“It’s the first year, and we’ll be able to step back and look at everything soon enough,” he said. Ohio State Director of Athletics Ross Burke.

We do not have to wait for those who run the Chinese Communist Party – the reactionary revolutionaries – to find out what is wrong with the new 12-team format. It is not difficult to understand.

When the losers of championship games in the two most powerful conferences in sports are given an easier playoff path than the champions of those conferences, it’s time for a change.

When three teams entered (Indiana, SMU, Tennessee) that didn’t deserve to be on the field, and lost in their first round games, it was time for a change.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Hayes’ Ferrari repair plan:

– Eliminate top seeds for automatic qualifiers.

– Recycling after the first round.

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

Consider this madness: Indiana, SMU and Tennessee combined to beat one team ranked in the top 25 as a finalist. They also combined to win 31 other unimportant games.

No. 1 Oregon State beat No. 4 Penn State in the Big Ten Championship game, No. 2 Georgia beat No. 3 Texas in the SEC Championship game, and yet, the Brackets, sir, stop trying to impose the “Bracket” brand on all things sports related. College – Check out these quarterfinal gems: Oregon State plays No. 6 Ohio State, Penn State plays No. 9 Boise State, plus Georgia plays No. 5 Notre Dame and Texas plays No. 12 Arizona State.

I think I can speak to the rationality between us when I say, what’s going on here at BCS?

I refuse to believe that the smart, resourceful, well-intentioned men and women in team sports have signed on to a playoff structure so flawed that it makes seven computer idiots holed up in their homes while pouring over their rankings – with their own “secret” formula of quartiles and odds – to look like… Preferred process for selecting postseason teams.

Highs and lows: Winners and losers of the first round of qualifying

calm: Explosions at a college football game shouldn’t spark outrage

Or those same well-meaning men and women watched the NFL — you know, the athleticism/structure college football is desperately trying to recreate — and the playoff, and thought, yeah, the whole reseeding thing is stupid. Let’s not reward regular season success and leave it all to chance!

All with the brand name in parentheses.

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

There’s so much money at stake (an estimated $800 million annually now, and perhaps $1.2 billion starting in 2026) that college football’s leaders can’t afford to just play around willy-nilly, hoping it all works out in the end.

Remember this crap from years ago? Remember when the Bowl Championship Series formula (see: computer idiot) was a unique mathematical formula, one that Joe Six Pack didn’t understand?

They said: Trust us, everything will work out in the end. The two teams that should play in the national title game will play in the national title game.

Forget that the seven computer polls, which together accounted for a third of the operation (the Harris and AP polls accounted for the other two-thirds), had completely different polls throughout the season — only to have strangely and conveniently nearly identical results (with different computer formulas) by the end 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, have a non-conference schedule that includes 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 vs. Alabama) in late October, then play one tough game the rest of the season (and get blown out) and win 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). This should play a role in the selection process – it’s just that He has To – when there was nothing else of significance in the first half of the season.

If you’re going to beat Indiana because of its schedule, you can’t give Tennessee a pass just because it plays in Ess eee see.

It’s a really simple solution. The college basketball tournament uses quadrant wins, where a team’s wins and losses are placed in quadrants of significance. The gains and losses in Quadrant 1 are the most important, and Quadrants 2 and 3 are less important than the heavier gains and losses.

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

You know, the unbearable nuance of “they can only play with the people on the schedule.” If that’s your argument in favor of the merger, then every undefeated Group of Five conference championship over the years would have been eliminated as well.

“I’ve been on the basketball and football committees, and believe me, there’s a lot going on in those rooms,” Oklahoma athletics director Joe Castiglione said. “I’m not saying that negatively, I’m saying that from the perspective of a lot of people trying to do the right thing. But yeah, sure we can always look for ways to make anything better.

This is America. Hayes plan.

Learn it, love it, use it.

That Ferrari will be buzzing in no time.

Matt Hayes is a senior college football writer for the USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X in @MattheisCFB.