The GAA has been around long enough to know the need for evolution. This week's announcement of the proposals for a revamped football championship underlines the point. It represented the speed with which the association can respond to crisis when it wants.

Last April when the Football Development Committee plan was due before Congress, there were genuine concerns about the radical nature of the proposals but some officials were equally appalled by the deep-seated conservatism of many of the contributions to the day's debates. Caught between these two positions, the GAA hierarchy came to the conclusion that the football championship had to be changed from its current, deeply unsatisfactory format.

Yet it also had to be changed in a manner which would give the reforms a chance of being accepted. To that end, all four provincial secretaries were brought on board as was Frank Murphy, the Cork county secretary whose opinion of such departures tends to make or break them.

One of the most significant aspects of Monday's press conference was the confident intention to push for permanent adoption of the plan despite the two thirds majority that this will require. Accordingly there is no reason to believe that the proposals will not be accepted at the special congress in Dublin this October.

So what are we to make of the blueprint? From the outset, let it be emphasised that anything is better than the current system and its disastrous waste of resources - of both players and spectators. So from that perspective the workgroup's proposals are to be welcomed.

But before the FDC plan is consigned to the bin as the product of a few cracked boffins who didn't get out for air often enough, let's compare like with like. The principal weakness in the earlier plan was the risk it ran of building too many meaningless matches into the season's schedule. Yet this happened simply because the FDC was trying to accommodate the unwieldy provincial system.

It must have stirred wistful feelings in the hearts of those former FDC members who also served on the workgroup to see a committee, partly comprised of the provincial secretaries, blithely by-pass the provincial championships by initiating a prototype open draw for all counties except the eventual provincial champions.

The idea fails to make it sufficiently advantageous for provincial champions. They qualify for the All-Ireland quarter-finals but could end up playing a team which has arrived at the same stage via a slightly less taxing route. Home advantage for the provincial champions will only be a definite advantage in Munster and Connacht because Ulster and Leinster have only one ground with the necessary capacity for high-profile matches.

It makes you wonder how concern for the good of the provincial championships, which loomed so large in previous debates, became so easily placated.

The proposals unveiled will certainly score on one front: the provision of more high-profile, competitive matches at the sharp end of the season - as opposed to the FDC plans for lots of matches in the initial stages. But there were two issues on which the FDC was emphatically correct: the abandonment of the National Football League and the introduction of a league-based championship.

The arguments underpinning the large cross-provincial conferences were that they guaranteed 10 matches to every county. Maybe not all of these would have been as competitive as knockout games, but they would have been there for supporters, children especially, to follow their local team.

When Sky Sports' relentless hyping of the Premiership is drawn down as an example to the GAA, it's not always noted that even mediocre soccer clubs have a guaranteed season of matches. The extra matches under the workgroup's proposals are welcome but still don't provide a decent season for everyone.

One of the more puzzling aspects of the proposals is the core insistence on retaining the league. Effectively this uses up fixtures in the spring and takes them from the summer when conditions are optimum for football. The desire of many in the GAA to run two separate competitions was acknowledged at Monday's press conference but at no stage was it explained, let alone justified.

GAA president Sean McCague accepted that some of the more corrosive attitudes towards the league come from team managers, in that sense from within the association. But there has been no hard thinking as to why managers should hold this dismissive view. Improved marketing of the league occasionally surfaces as a possible remedy even though such attempts to revive the Railway Cups debunked that nostrum.

Marketing the league is like marketing black and white televisions. The competition has been overtaken by events. Pretending that the schedule of league matches can be a help for weaker counties flies in the face of evidence that the only beneficiaries of a serious approach to the competition are big counties engaged in team-building - like Cork and Armagh last year.

Once the rebuilding has given way to a settled line-up, interest in the league falls away - as with Cork and Armagh this year. Ironically, the recasting of the championship is only going to make it more important and the league less relevant. The teams who suffer are the weaker counties who get the bulk of their competitive schedule in the mud and rain of February and March. In other words the advantages of a decent programme of matches only applies when the league format is applied to the most important competition, in this case the championship.

These reservations aside, the workgroup report is an ingenious step in the right direction. Maybe it's a pity that the workgroup are looking for instant adoption rather than for an experimental period given the way perceptions can quickly change.

For instance the interesting possibilities of the proposals won't be lost on the Hurling Development Committee as they consider the future of the hurling championship after the back-door experiment, which has two years to run.