We Fix the FBS Playoffs

I am serious. Drop the conference championships, which are both ineffectual and redundant.  Jon Gruden made this point earlier this week and he is right. If a conference must have a champion, it can go back to whatever Byzantine criteria it was using before they became fifteen teams plus goliaths. Eliminating those games creates room for a first round of playoffs for teams seeded 9-24. This will allow you to give the top eight ranked teams a well-deserved bye. (To be clear, our bracket reflects the ranking in Week 14, before the conference title games. Hence IU as #2, etc.)

With all but one of the top twenty-five teams in the playoff, there won’t be much room for bitching and moaning. Of course, it won’t eliminate it, but that was never going to happen in the first place.

If this method was used this year, only JMU would have gotten the shaft. Clearly after the Dukes’ (as in JMU) conference championship, the committee felt it elevated them over North Texas. Without that game, they would have been stuck at twenty-five and out of the tournament. Hardly an injustice when you split hairs between twenty-four and twenty-five. It would not have hurt that other Duke. Recall that the Blue Devils only got to the ACC title game thanks to a convoluted tiebreaker in the first place.  If a conference has a five-loss champion by criteria, it doesn’t deserve a seat at the table.

The biggest issue with this solution is that you still have a committee doing the ranking. It wouldn’t be an issue necessarily with who gets in, but who/where they end up playing. The influence of outside interests (media, conferences, and soon to come – private equity!) undoubtedly could impact the seeding. It would be naïve to think that teams won’t be moved magically higher or lower when millions of dollars are at play. The Notre Dame conspiracy theorists would say that is already happening.

Purists may say there are too many rounds, but DII and DIII athletes have been able to handle tournaments bigger than this for years. It is already likely that the bracket jumps to sixteen teams next year. At some point, it will probably jump to thirty-two. I like twenty-four because I assume that group would have most of the conference champions in the top eight. Winning your conference should mean something and, in my model, that means getting a bye. Sentimental old-timers like me will also enjoy the renewed attention to the Top Twenty Five, which was the college football standard of excellence for years.

Earlier this summer, I argued that the NCAA got the playoffs right. Tearful ND fans and unrewarded conference champs Duke aside; it is still light years better than what we had in the past. However, the jump to a twenty-four bracket makes the FBS playoffs even better. It won’t fix the Bowl Games though. For better or worse, that tradition is cooked.

Last Week: Not Great but not Awful