Utah restaurant owner on a crusade to start BCS championship

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SANDY -- As we get deeper into the college football season, non-BCS teams continue to break through the top 10, but the question remains: Will a non-BCS team ever get a shot at playing for a national title? One Utah restaurant owner is making it his personal goal to make sure non-BCS teams have a chance.

When John Larson is not busy taking orders, making sandwiches, or serving soup at Oliva's Cafe in Sandy, he's running a national campaign to change college football.

He's the creator and operator of startaplayoff.com, a website that has generated so much buzz in the last three weeks that it's getting national attention.

"ESPN Radio talked about us already," says Larson. "We've been on ESPN a couple of times."

He says the purpose of the website is to generate support for a play-off system. The site averages about 5,000 hits a day from fans across the country.

Larson says, "Over the past several years, I've been very frustrated, as many football fans have been, about the way college football is finished every year. So being the entrepreneur that I am, I went to the internet and looked for a website about a play-off or starting a play-off, and I couldn't find one, so I decided to register the name startaplayoff.com."

Right now Larson's website is pretty basic. It has message boards, a bracket suggestion page and polls where visitors can vote on whether or not there should even be a play-off.

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The BCS or Bowl Championship Series is a five-game arrangement for post-season college football designed to match the top two teams in a national championship game. Eight other highly ranked teams with compete in the four other games, which are the Fiesta Bowl, Orange Bowl, Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl. The champions of the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-10 and SEC automatically qualify for BCS games. Notre Dame qualifies automatically if it is in the top eight of the final BCS Standings. Champions from the other FBS conferences, including MWC, can qualify, but must in the top 12 of the final BCS Standings or ranked in the top 16 and ranked higher than the champion from an automatic qualifying conference.

He says, "Ninety-six percent of the people say we should have a play-off, of course that's 96 percent of the people who are going to my website that are saying that."

There's also a fan photo page where fans from around the country have submitted pictures wearing T-shirts and holding signs that read "No more BCS, start a playoff."

"We are getting e-mails from all over the country too," says Larson. "People asking us and telling us they love what we're doing and they support it."

Larson says changing the BCS is no small task and it's going to take more than a website created by a restaurant owner. But once he does get enough support, he says he plans on addressing the BCS committee at their next annual meeting.

He says, "I really believe that it will happen someday. I might not be the one that forces it, but I might be, you never know, but I am not going to sit back idle and let it happen without trying to do something."

And on a side note, while Larson says he cheers for all the college football teams in Utah, he says his loyalty lies with the Nebraska Huskers.

E-mail: spark@ksl.com