What a College Football Playoff Should Look Like

The Bracket Briefer likes to wander outside of college basketball from time to time. In this case, it is to look at what a college football playoff would look like if the powers that be did it right. Yes, yes, the BCS is gone, and next year, we have ourselves a four-team playoff, but that would still be riddled with a great deal of problems.

For one, who is #4? Stanford has one more loss than Michigan State and, as a result, found itself behind Michigan State in both polls, and in the instance of the coaches' poll, the Cardinal was ranked as far back as #7. Computers lie far less frequently than humans, and Stanford had a clear computer edge, tied even with Alabama, given Stanford's ridiculously difficult schedule. So who would you want in your playoff?

The main problem is simply the number of games. There aren't enough games to be able to compare two teams that haven't played each other. Each team plays only four non-conference games, and one of those games is quite often against a FCS team. In college basketball, at least, there are far more non-conference games, and teams play double the amount of conference games so that crazy outlier games don't have too much weight.

A playoff put together by a committee does take care of one problem, the issue that a loss earlier in the season is far better than a loss later in the season. That one factor has had far too great of an impact on the BCS landscape. The NCAA committee seems immune to the logic of the polls where you always drop for a loss and you always move up or stay the same if you win.

My favorite model for a football playoff would be similar to the basketball tournament: every conference gets an automatic winner, and the rest of the slots are filled with at-larges, building the bracket avoiding first-round rematches and conferencemates meeting too early (I'd also set a 3-team limit rule per conference). That bracket would look something like this:

Seed	Team
1 16	Florida State (ACC) Louisiana-Lafayette (SB)
8 9	Oregon Missouri
5 12	Michigan State (B10) UCF (AAC)
4 13	Stanford (P12) Bowling Green (MAC)
3 14	Alabama Fresno State (MWC)
6 11	Baylor (B12) Missouri
7 10	Ohio State Arizona State
2 15	Auburn (SEC) Rice (CUSA)

Like the bowl system? I can incorporate that:

Seed	First Round	Quarterfinals	Semifinals	Final
Site 1 16	Sun Bowl Florida State (ACC) Louisiana-Lafayette (SB)	Capital One Bowl	Orange Bowl	Rose Bowl
Site 8 9	Russell Athletic Bowl Oregon Missouri
Site 5 12	Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl Michigan State (B10) UCF (AAC)	Sugar Bowl
Site 4 13	Peach Bowl Stanford (P12) Bowling Green (MAC)
Site 3 14	Alamo Bowl Alabama Fresno State (MWC)	Cotton Bowl	Fiesta Bowl
Site 6 11	Gator Bowl Baylor (B12) Missouri
Site 7 10	Holiday Bowl Ohio State Arizona State	Peach Bowl
Site 2 15	Outback Bowl Auburn (SEC) Rice (CUSA)

The point being with a bracket like this is that you avoid the problem that you simply just don't know what will happen when teams from two different conferences play each other. It removes the problem of polls being too reactive to what most recently happened and to the computers not being able to rate teams across conferences very well.