Last week's question showed strong support for a 3-4 round playoff, with a pure plus one taking second place. The BCS and my preferred flexible design tied for third. The comments leaned strongly for a 16 team playoff.

This week we begin looking at who should be invited to the playoff, specifically what do we do with conference champions.

Do we let them all participate? Do we require all participants to win their conference? Do we through out conference results altogether and use rankings alone? Can some conferences earn a privileged seeding?

A look at these ideas after the jump.

Invite all conference champion

This concept benefits from guaranteeing all teams access prior to the season. Win your conference and you are in.

Inviting all champions forces a four round playoff for at least six teams. I am not sure most people, especially fans, are opposed to watching four rounds of games. University presidents and athletic directors have a much larger say than most people and would have serious concerns.

The biggest weakness of this idea is that teams can be very bad and win a conference. FSU gets heat for winning the ACC at 9-4, but that is nothing. Sun Belt, MAC and C-USA champions rarely finish in the top 25. The lowest ranked conference is often lower than #50 in the computer rankings. North Texas won the Sun Belt with a record of 5-6 in 2001. Why should a team winning a mediocre conference be preferred over a runner up in a stronger conference?

Another issue is how to make this design fair to independents.

Require participants to be a conference champion

Here we swing the pendulum entirely the other way. Now, rather than making conference championships an automatic qualification we are making them a requirement to narrow the field.

This concept resonates with the idea that if you aren't the best team in your conference, how can you be the best team in the nation?

The weakness is that often one of the teams in the top two spots fail to win their conference.

It should be noted that these first two are not mutually exclusive. Again issues arise due to independents.

Ignore conference championships

Just use the top 8, 16, however many, teams and seed them, regardless of championship status.

This plan allows all teams with a reasonable claim to the title at the end of the season an opportunity to play for the title.

A major weakness is that a tournament would weaken the perceived value of the regular season and conference championships strongly support the value of the regular season. To undermine the conference championships would further undermine the regular season.

Compromise

I don't recall the last time a one loss team from any conference was not ranked in the top 25.

Allow all conference champions in the top 25 to participate. Fill in the remaining spots with the highest ranked teams.

This provides a strong balance between access for all conferences and requiring some degree of merit, while respecting the conference champions.

A weakness is that the rankings are subjective, which might be an issue if a conference champion is high in the ORV column.

Earned benefits

The idea here is that conference strength should count for something. A twelve team design would allow four conference champions to have a bye week. The top four teams that year are a solid choice here, another option is to give these spots to the champions of the four highest ranked conferences in the previous four years.

This would add interest to the regular season because games outside the conference your team is in would effect the ranking of your team's conference and your team's chances at a bye the following year.

A major drawback is the subjectivity of the conference rankings. How would you combine the three BCS conference metrics?