College Football and the 2018 Death to the BCS Playoffs

It's late August. And that usually means that it's time for me to begin preparations for the upcoming college football season and thus the Death to the BCS Playoffs. It's been one of my favorite projects to undertake over the last several years. But circumstances have changed.

You may remember back in March I wrote a kind of cryptically-titled post on here. And my fears in March have been somewhat confirmed. While there have been updates on WhatIfSports, one of which enabled me to cobble together this year's big project in the second NFL Tournament of Champions, college football has not updated yet. Supposedly the 2017 teams are in the works, but as of August 22nd, those teams are still not live, which gives me little faith that the 2018 teams will be come December.



And so I must confirm that my posting schedule from past falls will end up changing. Normally I would make two to three posts a week about college football: one going over the non-conference schedules for the week (including the annual Nick Saban Is A Coward Week feature) and one going over results with a formula I stole from the IHSA. Once I was down to few enough undefeated teams to not leave anyone out, those weekly posts would be followed by mock playoff brackets.

With the lack of 2017 teams, I am opting to cancel the 2018 Death to the BCS Playoffs as well. This means that I will not be continuing this series of college football posts for this fall. It's a tough decision, but I don't want to pour that much effort into something that's not going to happen. Now that said, because I can't help myself, I will still track numbers for the 2018 college football season. Those numbers can be viewed here, with explanations on what each metric means in the initial link I posted above. But I won't be doing writeups of how each conference compares to each other, and I won't be building out mock brackets. But I will probably end up building a final field for the 2018 Death to the BCS Playoffs anyway, on the off chance that WhatIfSports does get the teams in place.

Since I'm not doing weekly posts about this, I also want to iterate my position on a few teams with regards to postseason eligibility as I do in every season opening post. Teams that play more than one FCS team in a season, barring an emergency fill in due to a cancellation for whatever reason, will be suspended from the playoffs. However, two other teams are permanently banned from the Death to the BCS Playoffs, and if you've been a regular COAS reader, you know who they are and why they're here. Penn State is permanently banned due to its being a cult that prioritized the image of the program over the well-being of children (and this is not solely a potshot a Joe Paterno but rather at the university as a whole for failing to deal with this). Baylor is similarly permanently banned due to the sexual assaults by football players that the program tried to cover up. I am also placing Ohio State on probation pending the result of the ongoing investigation into former assistant coach Zach Smith's domestic violence allegations and whether head coach Urban Meyer or athletic director Gene Smith failed to do what they were legally and/or morally obligated to do. If it's found that either man failed in those duties, the Buckeyes will also be banned, perhaps permanently, but I'm not throwing the book at them without the facts being established.

And so on this front, I will see you in December when I decide on the field for the cancelled 2018 Death to the BCS Playoffs. In the meantime, please enjoy the 2018 edition of the Confessions of a Sportscaster Pigskin Pick 'Em, which you can join here. Adam's and my weekly series will continue to appear on here every Thursday morning of the NFL season.