As I noted on the site formerly known as Twitter yesterday, the College Football Playoff Committee is a joke—a deeply unserious group of people who will bend over backwards to favor “brand-name” programs and the Southeastern Conference while hosing other deserving teams.
But the biggest problem, the one which allows the committee to shaft lesser-name teams in favor of undeserving “name” programs, is the expanded power conferences. When you’re playing in a league of 16 to 18 teams, you can only play about half the teams in your conference, and scheduling can be very uneven. That creates a massive window of subjectivity that the playoff committee can exploit in order to favor its darlings while giving less-favored programs the shaft. (“Well, they didn’t play anybody good.”)
About a year ago, I proposed that the power conferences form a 70-team “Premier League” subdivided into seven conferences of ten teams each. As a refresher, this is the realignment I proposed:
ATLANTIC COAST: Clemson, Duke, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Maryland, North Carolina, North Carolina State, South Carolina, Virginia, Wake Forest
BIG TEN: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Purdue, Wisconsin
EASTERN: Boston College, Central Florida, Miami, Notre Dame, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, Syracuse, Virginia Tech, West Virginia
HEARTLAND: BYU, Cincinnati, Colorado, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Louisville, Missouri, Nebraska, Utah
PACIFIC TEN: Arizona, Arizona State, California, UCLA, Oregon, Oregon State, USC, Stanford, Washington, Washington State
SOUTHEASTERN: Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, LSU, Mississippi, Mississippi State, Tennessee, Vanderbilt
SOUTHWEST: Arkansas, Baylor, Houston, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, SMU, Texas, Texas A&M, TCU, Texas Tech
With this lineup, selecting the 12-team playoff field would be relatively easy and much less subjective. Every team would play every other team in its conference, creating clear tiebreakers where needed. Each power conference team would get an auto-bid, and one auto-bid would be granted to the lesser conferences. All conference champions would either get a bye or host a first-round game as a reward for actually winning something. Four at-large teams would play on the road in the first round.
If this system were in place this year, we could make the following assumptions:
- South Carolina would get the automatic bid as the ACC champion (by virtue of its win at Clemson).
- Ohio State and Indiana would tie for first in the Big Ten, with Ohio State getting the auto-bid on the head-to-head tiebreaker.
- Either Notre Dame or Penn State would get the automatic bid from the Eastern League, with Miami losing out due to its loss at Syracuse, regardless of whether it beat either Notre Dame or Penn State. We will assume Miami would not have beaten both and probably would have lost to both.
- Either BYU or Iowa State would get the automatic bid from the Heartland, with Colorado losing out due to its loss at Nebraska.
- Oregon would go undefeated and get the automatic bid as the Pac-10 champion.
- Georgia and Tennessee would tie for first in the SEC at 7-2, with Georgia getting the automatic bid on the head-to-head tiebreaker. (This assumes Mississippi defeated Alabama, with both teams going 6-3.)
- Texas would get the automatic bid as the SWC champion and would be undefeated, having not played Georgia.
- Boise State would get the bid from the non-power conferences.
- Undefeated Texas would get the top seed.
- Undefeated Oregon would likely be the second seed, unless Penn State went undefeated, with conference wins over Notre Dame and Miami, in which case Penn State would probably get the second seed and Oregon the third seed. But we’ll assume Notre Dame defeated Penn State, which means Ohio State gets the third seed (at 11-1 with a loss to Michigan), Georgia gets the fourth seed (despite two losses), and Notre Dame gets the fifth seed (still hampered, justifiably, by its loss to Northern Illinois).
- South Carolina, Boise State and the BYU-Iowa State winner get seeds 6-8, in that order. South Carolina would likely have no more than one loss if it played in the ACC and might even be undefeated, but would still likely be placed behind Georgia and maybe even one-loss Notre Dame.
- Penn State, with only one loss, gets the ninth seed. SEC co-champ Tennessee gets the tenth seed, Big Ten co-champ Indiana gets the eleventh seed, and either BYU or SMU gets the twelfth seed (with BYU getting in over SMU, but SMU edging out Iowa State, depending on who won the BYU-Iowa State game). We’ll assume BYU defeated Iowa State, but its loss at home to Kansas keeps BYU behind Boise State. (We are also assuming SMU finished second to Texas in the Southwest Conference, which may be a stretch, but we’ll go with it.)
With all these assumptions, here is how a playoff bracket would have worked out under this system:
- Game 1—#9 Penn State at #8 BYU
- Game 2—#12 SMU at #5 Notre Dame
- Game 3—#10 Tennessee at #7 Boise State
- Game 4—#11 Indiana at #6 South Carolina
- Game 5—Game 1 winner vs. #1 Texas (Cotton Bowl)
- Game 6—Game 2 winner vs. #4 Georgia (Sugar Bowl)
- Game 7—Game 3 winner vs. #2 Oregon (Rose Bowl)
- Game 8—Game 4 winner vs. #3 Ohio State (Orange Bowl)
- Game 9—Game 5 winner vs. Game 6 winner
- Game 10—Game 7 winner vs. Game 8 winner
- Game 11—Championship