The college football playoff is not a novel concept. Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty, who led the Spartans to two consecutive titles in 1965 and 1966, proposed a sensible, egalitarian, eight-team playoff plan in 1966.

Daughtery would have included six conference champions from the Big Ten, the Big Eight, the Southwest Conference, the Southeastern Conference, the Pacific Conference and the Atlantic Coast Conference. These teams would have been joined by the top two independents, which then included multiple other programs besides Notre Dame.

He then would have divided the “tremendous” television revenue completely equally between the 120 Division I schools. His rough estimate was that the tournament would earn around $2.4 million in TV revenue, $20,000 per school.

Then NCAA executive secretary William Byers did not poop on the idea as impractical. He was supportive.

I don’t see why college football cannot follow the same national collegiate playoff pattern as all other intercollegiate sports enjoy.

Why did Daugherty embrace the revolutionary banner? He was upset from the year before when the AP poll had the audacity to award the national title after the Rose Bowl, which MSU lost 14-12 to UCLA. Because awarding titles in a team sport based on what a bunch of men thought, from its very inception, was profoundly stupid.

[HT to Stewart Mandel, Photo via Presswire]