Lane Kiffin has the kernels of an idea about how to fix the College Football Playoff system.

The Ole Miss Rebels coach thinks the format should be expanded to 16 teams, but there's a catch. He doesn't want any automatic bids. He was a system that takes the 16 best teams in the nation, even if that means taking a few extra teams from a certain conference.

You can probably guess which conference Kiffin thinks most of the good teams play in.

"There's still flaws in every system," said Kiffin. "The best system should be 16 and it should be the 16 best. And I don't know exactly how that's figured out. I think that you gotta use some indexes and have probably media people that watch the most and don't have any other motives in it. Figure out the best 16 teams. We obviously can't play enough games over that to be like 32 or 64 or something to figure out the best."

Kiffin then gave a hint as to where the committee might find most of the best 16 teams by pointing out recent results in other sports.

"I think as you watch this year in sports and now baseball, softball after men's basketball. You know, so many dominate whether it's the final eight or 12 or 16 with SEC teams," Kiffin continued. "And there's systems of figuring that out. I think a lot of that has to do with the non-conference amount of opponents they play. Obviously, we don't have as many games so we can't do that. You see for instance baseball, these teams that made it this far that have SEC in-conference records just a little bit over .500. So I think that would be the best way to do it. Get rid of automatics and figure out a system to get the best 16 teams in."

Coincidentally, Ole Miss finished the most recent regular season ranked No. 14 in the CFP poll and No. 16 in the AP poll while only the top 12 teams made the College Football Playoff. The year before Ole Miss finished their regular season No. 11 in both polls as the top six teams earned invites.


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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Lane Kiffin Offers Simple Idea for Potential 16-Team College Football Playoff Format.

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