What A 16 Team College Football Playoff Would Look Like In 2014
By J.P. Scott
The College Football Playoff is here. It’s good with four teams. It would be better with sixteen.
We as fans have been asking for a College Football Playoff for years. On Sunday, we officially got our wish, as the first ever College Football Playoff Committee selected the four teams who will play for the national championship at the Football Bowl Subdivision level.
Don’t get me wrong – I love the idea. I think a playoff is exactly what the sport has needed for a long time. Four teams is okay. Eight teams would be better. Sixteen teams would be ideal.
Yes, sixteen.
You see, I am in the mindset that we need to reward people for winning their conference – regardless of what conference – with a chance to prove their mettle against the best teams in the land. Sending a team to Detroit or Mobile as a reward for winning a championship seems like a backhanded compliment if you ask me.
My plan to fix this and create a 16-team College Football Playoff is easy and fair. It is modeled largely after college basketball’s March Madness.
You start by keeping the College Football Playoff committee. They rank 25 teams every week. We are going to need that once we set this playoff up.
First things first – everyone drops a non-conference game. This is to make up for the possibility of a team having to play as many as four more football games after their conference championship game. Sure, if you don’t make it, you lost a game off the schedule. But look at it this way, at least that’s one more week the students get to study.
After all, we are all about the student-athlete. Right? RIGHT?
The next step is to give the conference champions – all ten of them – automatic bids to the 16-team tournament. This means, regardless of whether or not you play a conference championship game, you are going to need a fair way to decide who the one true champion is. The Big 12 was unable to do that this season. For that reason, they were shut out of the four-team playoff.
Once you have your ten conference champions set, you look to the committee to fill in the remaining at large teams. This will not be a difficult process. They already rank the Top 25. Your six at-large teams are simply the top six ranked teams who did not win their conference. Too easy!
Next, you’ll have to seed them. Once again, you lean on the committee for this. You start by seeding the teams in the order they were ranked in the committee’s Top 25. Eventually, you are going to have to seed a handful of teams who are not ranked. It would be up to the committee to seed those teams accordingly. For the purpose of this exercise, I’ve seeded those teams. In some cases, I even picked a conference champion when there was a tie. Someone had to.
As far as what bowls to use, you keep the same six bowls currently used by the College Football Playoff. Instead of rotating two bowls for the semifinals every year, you would use four of those six for the quarterfinals.
You’d then pick two different neutral sites every year for the semifinals and keep the championship game in Dallas if you wanted. You could rotate that as well.
The round-of-sixteen games would be played in the home stadiums of the higher ranked teams in order to maximize attendance.
Imagine a Saturday in the middle of December with eight games starting at noon and continuing into the evening where each game actually meant something. It would be a college football fan’s dream, regardless of who was playing.
Additionally, this 16-team playoff would be the smallest playoff of any level of college football.
How would this version of the College Football Playoff look in 2014? Based on the criteria I laid out, including my choice for lower seeds and conference tie-breakers, you’d get something like this:
No. 16 Georgia Southern (Sun Belt Champion) at No. 1 Alabama (SEC Champion)
No. 9 Ole Miss (At Large) at No. 8 Michigan State (At Large)
No. 12 Boise State (Mountain West Champion) at No. 5 Baylor (Big 12 Champion)
No. 13 Marshall (Conference USA Champion) at No. 4 Ohio State (Big Ten Champion)
No. 14 Northern Illinois (MAC Champion) at No. 3 Florida State (ACC Champion)
No. 11 Kansas State (At Large) at No. 6. Texas Christian (At Large)
No. 10 Arizona (At Large) at No. 7 Mississippi State (At Large)
No. 15 Memphis (AAC Champion) at No. 2 Oregon (PAC 12 Champion)
I don’t know about you, but I see some great matchups in the first round and a lot of possibilities going forward that might look different that the current final four.
There is only one reason this system would not be adopted: Money. Power-5 conference teams invest too much money into their programs to risk being ousted from a college football playoff by a mid-major. Furthermore, there wouldn’t be as much drama and intrigue in this system. You wouldn’t have nearly the interest in the selection show that you had on Sunday. As a result, there would be less advertising dollars.
For now, college football will continue on as the only major team sport-oriented entity on the planet that decides who gets to play for its greatest prize by polling a group of 12 people. There are no automatic bids.
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