Because I know some Buckeye defenders will talk about the 51 days between the end of their season and the BCS Championship game, why not start the season a few weeks later?

Is there any particular reason why the first games have to be played at the beginning of September? If you start the season in the mid-to-late September, around the 15th for example, a 13-week season (12 games plus a bye week) would end in early December. The conferences with title games would be decided a week later, early-to-mid December. If you do the schedule this way then the BCS Championship participants would have less than a month to wait between games.

The only problem would be for the smaller, non-BCS conferences with championship games. It would be a good idea to arrange the bowls so that, every bowl participant has at least two weeks off after their regular season ends. That means the very early bowls couldn't include teams that have played for their conference titles. That wouldn't be a problem for the BCS conferences because those teams would be playing in late December-early January bowl games.

The problem becomes when that schedule runs into a school's fall semester finals week. Lots of school have them the second or third week of December, and if games are spilling into that athletes are going to be in a bit of trouble.

Well what about the non-Division I (or Bowl Subdivision, as it's currently called) teams. They have playoffs that run threw the middle of December. Don't those players have finals?

Yes and so do all of the basketball players etc. It's just another cop out for keeping the money for the bowls. If we had started the playoffs when the first bowl was played this season and ended them with the national championship game, we could have seen three rounds. Throw in one more round during that layoff at the beginning of December and you're set. Only two teams would playing all four weeks anyway. But it looks like that won't be happening until 2010 at the earliest.

I'll be blunt. Why start the season later when a playoff system would solve the problem much simpler?

That really wasn't meant to be a cop-out by any means. I didn't think about non-division 1 teams, but I know for a fact that Illinois' basketball team doesn't have games during finals week and the practices are very light.

I am a proponent of a play-off system, but I'm against anything that would run into a finals week. Remember, players on the field are students too, and while being one of those things is hard, being both of those things must be incredibly difficult.