It may be time to fix whole college football system

SALT LAKE CITY — Now that BYU football games are possibly going to be played where the sun don't shine, i.e. the Eastern United States, why not take it one step further?

For instance, bulldozing this whole conference thing.

If you thought tax laws were convoluted, try wrapping your mind around this: In the Big East Conference, BYU would be roughly 2,300 miles from home when playing at Connecticut, 2,200 when playing Rutgers and 1,900 when visiting South Florida.

It's a good thing Alaska-Anchorage doesn't have a football team.

With Boise State, Air Force, SMU, Houston, Central Florida, Navy and BYU potentially joining Rutgers, Connecticut, Louisville, Cincinnati and South Florida in football, the old system of regional conferences is being challenged. You do what you can to survive.

Which raises the question of whether the NCAA should do a reset on the entire system.

This isn't a complete fruitcake idea. Western Athletic Conference commissioner Karl Benson noted several weeks ago that a football-only organization made sense to him. (It should, considering he hasn't been able to keep teams from abandoning his own conference.) Since the BCS already runs the bowl games, and the NCAA pleads no contest when the issue of automatic bowl bids arises, why not separate football entirely?

When Benson recently heard a WAC/Big East/Mountain West/Conference USA merger was being discussed, he said it was originally a 22-team football-only plan. "A week later it's 32 teams," Benson said, "and who knows? Maybe the next week it will be 48 teams."

His idea is to create a football-only organization with eight 10-team divisions that are geographically placed.

"Those 80 schools could have their own organizations, rules, manage their own TV and post-season. They would operate as a stand-alone entity," Benson said.

Other sports could then align under the NCAA umbrella in their own regional conferences. Universities that don't survive with the big football programs — Utah State, for instance — could play with the FCS teams such as Southern Utah and Weber State.

The BCS could arrange the bowl games or even have a playoff at the end of each season.

This makes entirely too much sense, even though current TV and conference contracts would need to be reworked.