Ditch colleges’ conference title games

College football’s conference title games are upon us, starting with Friday night’s Utah-Washington game and offering a full schedule on Saturday. Outside the realm of the competing schools, maybe three people care.

There’s a solution to this lost weekend, with an expanded playoff system as part of the bargain. It’s astounding that college football hasn’t seen the light, but let’s hope the blundering buffoons read this week’s helpful reminders from some very wise observers, including Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel and former Stanford sports information director Gary Cavalli, who writes a weekly blog.

In essence: Ditch the conference championships altogether and make this the first weekend of an eight-team playoff.

Seriously, what’s the point of a “title game” when the regular season dictates everything you need to know? Washington had the Pac-12’s best record and beat Utah earlier this year. Oklahoma is the only one-loss team in the Big 12. Alabama was the clear champion of the SEC, and so forth.

Worse yet, the neutral sites (in the Pac-12’s case, Levi’s Stadium) make for paltry attendance and a tepid atmosphere for the championship games, especially if they yield rematches from the regular season. Then there’s the greatest joke of all: a four-team playoff on a landscape that includes five major conferences.

This column has long argued for a system that includes automatic bids for the Power Five conferences and three at-large bids. As suggested by Wetzel, this weekend’s first round could give us home-field advantages for the highest seeds and the following matchups: No. 8 Washington at No. 1 Alabama, No. 7 UCF at No. 2 Clemson, No. 6 Ohio State at No. 3 Notre Dame, and No. 5 Oklahoma at No. 4 Georgia.

How’s that for great theater? The executive decisions in college football are all about revenue and TV ratings, each of which would be jacked up immeasurably with this new system.

At least we have a truly meaningful game, Cal vs. Stanford, on Saturday. The Big Game will be aired strictly on the Pac-12 Network, which is really annoying, and this week brought even worse news for the conference’s TV setup: AT&T will no longer carry the Pac-12 Networks on its U-verse service, effective on Sunday.

This makes it even less likely that a partnership with DirecTV could be arranged any time soon. To put it another way, a terribly inadequate system just got worse. Nice work.