College Football Playoff

Every year around this time everyone from casual fans to coaches discuss the problems with the Bowl Championship Series(BCS) and how they would fix it. Of course I have an idea and here it is:

A 16 team tournament featuring the conference champions from all 11 conferences, yes even the WAC and Sun Belt, plus the top 5 at-large team in the Bowl Championship Tournament rankings. The difference between these ranking and the current BCS standings is the fact that my ranking have no human polls which takes that element out of the rankings.

2011 Final Rankings:
The teams highlighted in yellow are the at-large teams.

Based on the rankings the teams in the 2011 Bowl Championship Tournament are:
LSU, Alabama, Oklahoma St., Stanford, Arkansas, Boise St., Oregon, Kansas St., Wisconsin, Clemson, TCU, Southern Miss., West Virginia, Arkansas St., Northern Illinois, Louisiana Tech
The at-large team come from the SEC(2), Big 12, Pac-12, and Mountain West.

The teams are ranking based on their place in the poll and matched up just how they should be in a 16 team bracket. The 1-16, 4-13, 5-12, and the 8-9 match-ups are in the East bracket while the other four game are in the West. The brackets swap each year and defined by the location of the 2nd and 3rd round games. The East bowl games are Outback, Capital One, and Orange and the West bowl games are Rose, Cotton, and Fiesta. The seventh bowl game is the Sugar bowl which this year is hosting the championship game. They rotate around each year so each bowl gets the championship once every 7 years and a semifinal game every 3-4 years. The 1st round game take place at the home of the highest ranked team which encourages team to play well during the season to get an extra home game.

Here is the bracket with the 1st round match-ups.

December 22 1st round games:

• West #8 Northern Illinois at West #1 Alabama, at Bryant-Denny Stadium
• East #7 West Virginia at East #2 Stanford, at Stanford Stadium
• East #6 Southern Miss at East #3 Arkansas, at Reynolds Razorback Stadium
• West #5 Clemson at West #4 Oregon, at Autzen Stadium

December 23 1st round games:

• East #8 Louisiana Tech at East #1 Louisiana State, at Tiger Stadium
• West #7 Arkansas State at West #2 Oklahoma State, at Boone Pickens Stadium
• West #6 TCU at West #3 Boise State, at Broncos Stadium
• East #5 Wisconsin at East #4 Kansas State, at Bill Snyder Family Football Stadium

A number of intriguing games and over the next couple of day I will be making predictions for all of these games and eventually crowning a BCT champion.

RIM to get ride of Blackberry?

At one point a few years ago the cool phones out there were Blackberries. They were the top choice of business people and many kids wanted them as well. Since then Apple has released it's hugely popular IPhone and Google has developed it's Android OS which is used in tons of the newest phones. These two developments have dropped RIM, Blackberry's maker, market share to around 9% down from 24% last year. There may be a day soon were Blackberries don't exist anymore but will RIM go down with the ship?
Not if they have anything to say about. From this article on MSNBC RIM is looking to become the IBM of the mobile phone world. RIM just announced Blackberry Mobile Fusion which is security software aim at its Blackberry phones as well as IOS and Android phones. Fusion can handle all the apps, password and other software currently being run on all of the phone it supports. It also can wipe the memory of a stolen or lost phone and is set up to keep people from leaving Blackberry Enterprise Servers, which are used by many businesses. Hopefully this software will be a success and give RIM time to revamp it's phone line to compete with Apple and Google because losing a company that has such a great history in phones would defiantly hurt the industry.