2013 Death to the BCS Playoffs: Official Bracket

Saturday was the BCS' final gasp. As far as drama goes, it went well for the "Cartel", what with the couple upsets and some compelling games. I maintain that having this 16-team playoff would do a lot of favors for the sport in that yesterday, basically every game would have had truer postseason impacts. It would also reduce a lot of the sheer hatred NIU suffered. I saw one person on Facebook who just lambasted them for no reason other than they were the modern day Boise State and dared tread on what elitists consider the sacred turf of the BCS. It's ludicrous.

Ultimately, that's why I started compiling stuff for a playoff system outlined in the book seen here. I'm sick of people talking crap about conferences like the MAC just because they're not the SEC, Pac-12 or what have you. So, with the regular season officially done (unless the Army-Navy game intrigues you to no end) it's time to outline what a truer college football postseason looks like.

A lot of people are arguing for either the 4-team playoff that gets implemented next year, but more people want either a four or eight-team playoff, with even some arguments for 10 or 12-team brackets. I'm arguing 16 because that gives every conference champion the opportunity to play for a national title. At that point you truly have every game really counting for something. To fill out the field, I will take 6 teams that didn't win a conference title but still had great regular seasons. Most years, this will likely mean most, if not all, one-loss teams and two-loss teams will also have a good shot.

The 16 teams will be seeded by a selection committee (read: me) with the help of some number crunching. The main reason for this is the other aspect of this playoff that really makes every game count: for the first three rounds, higher seeds get to host the games. Consider it a reward for a really good season.

Seedings are determined by kind of an organic process. I will look over schedules to try and decide who had some signature wins, how margin of victory looked, how bad their losses were, etc. I will also employ some math to help quantify things. Non-Conference Schedule Strength (NCSS) tries to analyze how well a team scheduled its out of conference slate. While it doesn't look at record, it rewards teams for playing major conference opponents and/or on the road and punishes scheduling cupcakes. It's not entirely a fair formula, but it can help a little bit. The more significant one that I created is the Playoff Points (PP) metric, which is basically the combined number of wins of each team a given school has beaten. It's a concept I borrowed from the IHSA. I also use a pair of computer rankings created by current or former people whose formulas were used by the BCS. Current computer guy Jeff Sagarin (SAG) has a "politically correct" version he sends them, but has a better ranking that I use. The late David Rothman (FACT) also created a formula that the BCS stopped using when they decided margin of victory wasn't important (or more so, decided it went against sportsmanship, which is something of a bogus argument). His formula is public domain and I found someone at UCLA who compiles it at the given link.

So without any further long-winded explanation or grandstanding, here's how the 2013 Death to the BCS Playoffs will be arranged.


1. Florida State (13-0, ACC Champion, LW: 1- PP: 71; NCSS: 4; SAG: 1st; FACT: 1st) 
2. Auburn (12-1, SEC Champion, LW: 5- PP: 77; NCSS: 3; SAG: 6th; FACT: 3rd) 
3. Stanford (11-2, Pac-12 Champion, LW: 7- PP: 77; NCSS: 3; SAG: 3rd; FACT: 4th) 
4. Baylor (11-1, Big 12 Champion, LW: 11- PP: 60; NCSS: 1; SAG: 5th, FACT: 10th)
5. Michigan State (12-1, Big Ten Champion, LW: 12- PP: 61; NCSS: 4; SAG: 7th, FACT: 6th)
6. Ohio State (12-1, At Large, LW: 2- PP: 62; NCSS: 4; SAG: 11th; FACT: 7th) 
7. Missouri (11-2, At Large, LW: 3- PP: 59; NCSS: 4; SAG: 9th; FACT: 5th) 
8. Alabama (11-1, At Large, LW: 6- PP: 54; NCSS: 3; SAG: 2nd; FACT: 2nd) 
9. Arizona State (10-3, At Large, LW: 8- PP: 63; NCSS: 2; SAG: 8th; FACT: 8th)
10. South Carolina (10-2, At Large, LW: 10- PP: 60; NCSS: 6; SAG: 17th; FACT: 13th) 
11. Central Florida (11-1, American Athletic Champion, LW: 13- PP: 53; NCSS: 8; SAG: 39th; FACT: 29th)
12. Oklahoma (10-2, At Large, LW: NR- PP: 55; NCSS: 4; SAG: 21st; FACT: 20th)  
13. Fresno State (11-1, MWC Champion, LW: 14- PP: 50; NCSS: 3; SAG: 52nd; FACT: 51st)
14. Bowling Green (10-3, MAC Champion, LW: NR- PP:42; NCSS: 6; SAG: 27th; FACT: 47th)
15. Rice (10-3, C-USA Champion, LW: 15- PP: 40; NCSS: 9; SAG: 69th; FACT: 68th)
16. Louisiana-Lafayette (8-4, Sun Belt Champion, LW: 16- PP: 34; NCSS: 8; SAG: 81st; FACT: 76th)

Dropped out of the playoffs: Oklahoma State (4), Northern Illinois (9)

I think I'm more than satisfied with how this turned out. I swapped things around a few times before arriving at what I thought was my "final draft" of seedings before finding a new problem. Avoiding rematches was not part of my formula, but I did seriously take it into consideration once I set the field and found a pair of rematches: Baylor-Oklahoma and Missouri-South Carolina. Poring over schedules, I found a way to feel all right about swapping Baylor for Michigan State and eliminate the lesser of the two rematches. The Mizzou-SC one bothers me more because SC won their game against Mizzou already, yet they have to play on the road. I justify that by the fact that Missouri won enough other games to make the SEC title game, and I value that a little higher. Ultimately, I couldn't find enough of a reason to move the 9-12 seeds around to eliminate the one rematch other than "I don't want rematches." It's a small price to pay to feel good about seedings.

As the lone unbeaten, FSU deserves the #1 seed, so the road to the title game will go through Tallahassee. Auburn gets the other highly coveted seed at #2 based on their conference title and tying with Stanford for the most Playoff Points. That playoff point total gave Stanford the #3 seed for the second straight year. While I'm not crazy about either of their losses, they beat enough other teams to be up there. Originally, Michigan State was the 4 seed and Baylor was the 5, but between the rematch problem and the fact that Baylor beat better non-conference foes (and by significantly more), I could give the Bears position for a second home game.

Michigan State rounds out the Top 5, and basically gives us the five major conference champions in a good order, so from there it was almost all at large bids. Ohio State ran the table up until the Big Ten title game and had one of the higher NCSS's. I seriously thought about bumping Missouri up, but that whole "12-0" thing sways me. At the 7 seed, even though the computers like Alabama more than Missouri, Missouri had more Playoff Points and a higher NCSS, plus their loss was in double overtime (though to be fair, Bama's loss was also agonizing).

In that 9-12 range, it's a tough draw for ASU, but those two regular season losses, plus that conference title loss to Stanford (again) that I can't put them over Alabama and give them a first round home game. 10-12 was tough because of that rematch aspect, but South Carolina's Playoff Point total was the highest, so a rematch is what we have. Oklahoma replaced Oklahoma State as an at large team with their win over the Cowboys, but I'm leaving them behind Central Florida despite a slightly higher Playoff Point total. UCF had a higher NCSS despite the fact that OU's schedule might have been a tad tougher. I'm ultimately going with UCF based on their single loss (by 3 to the up a seed South Carolina, so head-to-head plays in there) over Oklahoma's two losses, including the one to Texas.

The bottom has all the tiny conference champs. Fresno State with one loss gets the obvious 13 seed. Good computer rankings and a slightly higher Playoff Point total give MAC champion Bowling Green (that NIU win Friday looms large) gives them the 14 over Conference USA's champ in Rice. Louisiana-Lafayette gets the 16 seed since they have the worst record of all playoff teams. And to think some people find 16 teams too many.

The toughest cuts for me this season? Oklahoma State was probably the toughest (since they were in up until now), but head to head gives OU the berth over OSU (plus there's that West Virginia loss...). As much as I really wanted NIU to get in... I couldn't justify it. They don't have enough Playoff Points. Two Big Ten wins are good in a vacuum until you remember it's Iowa (mediocre) and Purdue (really bad). The other one loss team I bumped was Louisville, but they didn't beat anyone (only 42 Playoff Points, less than even NIU). The only other teams I really even looked at were Oregon and Clemson, neither of whom have enough playoff points. Duke also didn't have enough, and Georgia Tech and Pittsburgh losses soured me.

Overall, I like this field, and I like where everyone is seeded. If you want to look at how the bracket is situated, you can see it here. I'm giving everyone a couple weeks for finals and whatnot, then starting the playoffs the same time the bowls get going. There are four smaller bowl games that day, so nothing should really be getting preempted (and were this happening in reality, the games would probably get bumped from ESPN and ABC to say, ESPN2 or ESPNU in favor of the playoffs. Two games go at a time, and between ABC and ESPN (were they to win the unofficial contract) they'd have all the games. I tried not to screw anyone over with a funky time, other than Baylor's game having to start at 9:00 local time.

It's possible Yahoo's Dan Wetzel will have differing seeds or at large teams from me, but it's not a perfect system. As long as everyone has a chance to play for a national title when the season starts, that's all that matters. Starting December 21st, I'll be using WhatIfSports to simulate the playoffs using real weather and play these scenarios out. Let's push for a real postseason.