2021 Death to the BCS Playoffs: Auto Bid Games and At Large Picture

This is a more recent feature as part of the Death to the BCS Playoff series. Especially since I haven't been doing mock brackets this year, this means this post becomes all the more important.

Championship Weekend is all but upon us. That means ten games to determine ten conference champions, all of whom will get an automatic bid into the Death to the BCS Playoffs. For some, their playoff bid may be a formality, others may need to win that game to ensure they're already in. For still others, this is a game merely for seeding purposes. So many motivations all in play here.

There is one additional game being played this weekend: the makeup of Cal-USC that was postponed due to COVID a few weeks ago. Neither team is in the running for a playoff spot, but that game will have some ancillary effects on playoff contenders (possible additional playoff points).

I'll go into the full playoff criteria when I reveal the playoff field, but to give a general idea of what's going to happen with at large selection, I'm borrowing a process from Division III of the NCAA. They split the country into geographic regions, rank teams in each region, then for at large (what D-III calls "Pool C"), they take the top ranked team from each region that didn't earn an automatic bid and put them "at the table" for selection. They'll pick the best team based on criteria from that group, then the next team up from that region comes to the table. We'll do this for the Death to the BCS Playoffs, except by conference instead of region.

So with that in mind, let's look at the conference title games and what each conference's at large chances are.

2019 Death to the BCS Playoffs: Auto Bid Games and At Large Picture

I'm going to take a break from reveling in an all-time upset to look at the highest level of college football as we approach Championship Week.

The regular season is finally over and we're onto what are essentially play-in games for the College Football Playoff, but also for the Death to the BCS Playoffs, based off the system proposed in the book pictured here. As I'd hoped, I was able to track results over the course of the entire season and logged my metrics here. I've also, over the past couple weeks, been looking at computer rankings to prepare myself. I haven't officially built a mock bracket yet, but I at least kind of know where I'm going. I just want to get it in writing before the games are played, with the knowledge that computer rankings may change and with new factors getting added that things may end up changing.

But the point of this post, as in years prior, is to look at the upcoming games to determine automatic bids. Most of these are pretty straightforward. One piece I am adding in each entry this year is how at large odds look for each conference. The exact selection method will be explained next week when I build the bracket.

2018 Death to the BCS Playoffs: Automatic Bid Games

As I promised... the Death to the BCS Playoffs will live on.

I haven't done my two-to-three times a week series of posts on the 2018 college football season because I wasn't sure if my work would end up coming to fruition. But the 2017 college football teams showed up on my simulator, which likely means the 2018 teams are going to be coming as well.

In the interim, I have been continuing to track college football results and update my usual set of metrics. With Conference Championship Weekend approaching, that means the field will soon have its ten automatic bid recipients, and I'll need to pick my six at large teams and seed everyone. But that's getting a little ahead of myself.

As I've done in years past, I will go through the schedule for Week 14, noting that there are some additional games going on based on postponements from the regular season. Those games will get factored into teams' numbers and will obviously impact some things in terms of computer rankings. But the important games... the games that will determine automatic bid winners? Information on those comes after the jump.

2017 Death to the BCS Playoffs: Automatic Bid Games

I started this feature last year, because in Week 14 it's almost all conference championship games, and as such NCSS really won't make any changes. There are a few games where changes will be made, with that said, and you can check my spreadsheet for those updates. A quick survey of my schedule shows that there are all of two games this week that fit that criteria, though I will throw the Army-Navy game in as a feature for this week even though it's a week and a half out. It does count for those metrics.

Speaking of that Army-Navy game, that game won't have any bearing on the playoffs; neither team is in contention for an at-large bid (Navy has five losses, and Army has three without the requisite metrics to overcome them). As such, it thus comes down to a total of twelve games to fill the ten automatic bids. Nine of those are conference title games; I'll go into those games below. The other three are Sun Belt contests, and as the only conference without a championship game, the tiebreakers are once again messy.