The college football season has ended again-with more questions than answers. Now it’s bowl season, but there are a lot of fans, and congressmen, who wish it was time for the playoffs to begin. Our team at REvEvolution.net has been tracking the BCS college football rankings, trying to determine who would be in a postseason playoff if there actually were one. We’ve even designed a perfect playoff system that works within the current BCS bowl structure. It allows the NCAA to have its bowls at the same locations, on roughly the same dates, and have a playoff too.
We clearly outlined that system in a previous article, which can be viewed here, along with a hypothetical bracket. Our playoff system would require only 4 teams to play an additional game in the postseason, and the 2 championship teams to play an additional 2. Not much to ask, considering the fact that the FCS, formerly Division 1-AA, now has a 24 team, 5 round playoff.
The initial 8 team bracket we created can be found here: First Bracket. We simply took the 6 major conference champions, plus 2 at-large teams, and had them play at current bowl sites. That bracket was posted before Thanksgiving. Now that the conference championship games have been played, we’ve updated the bracket here. Click the image next to the title to view a larger version of our bracket.
On the final week of the college football season, Clemson upset Virginia Tech to gain an automatic bid from the ACC, and Houston was upset by Southern Mississippi, ruining their chances for a BCS berth.
To determine who would win a hypothetical college football playoff, we used a simple formula that combines strength of schedule with defensive and offensive statistics to predict winners. We came to the same conclusion that most experts have throughout the season. LSU and Alabama’s defenses are just too damn good. It would take a minor miracle for anyone to upset them.
In a championship game rematch between The Tigers and The Crimson Tide, our formula predicted a virtual tie. So we went to special teams, where LSU has a clear advantage. The Tiger’s punting game, Tyrann Mathieu’s punt returns and Alabama’s missed field goals could be the difference in the final game of the college football season. If that isn’t enough to separate these evenly matched teams, home field advantage should be. We played our hypothetical championship game at The Superdome in New Orleans, the site of this year’s actual BCS championship game. LSU, located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has won all 3 of its NCAA titles in New Orleans (in 1958, 2003 and 2007). 2011 should be no exception. We predict that LSU will beat Alabama again in a close one.
We just wish they would have to beat a few other teams in a playoff along the way to add more legitimacy to their title. As for Oklahoma State, Stanford and all those other teams who believe they should get a shot at the title-well, there’s always next year. Let’s hope the NCAA and BCS get together soon and figure out how easy it would be for them to dispense with the controversy and introduce a simple playoff system that would let teams decide the college football championship on the field, rather than in the media.