College Football and the 2019 Death to the BCS Playoffs

One of the major running features from the first few years of Confessions of a Sportscaster went on hiatus last year. To an extent, it's doing so again.

I had the idea fresh out of college after reading the book pictured here (a masterpiece, in my eyes) to try and implement the playoff system described by Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter, and Jeff Passan. And so starting in 2012, I was tracking results every week, posting them here, and at the end of the season building a playoff bracket based on their system, then simulating it out.

I ran into a problem in 2017; WhatIfSports, my simulator, had gone up for sale and thus teams weren't getting input like they had been so I wasn't able to maintain my usual pattern of posting results. That meant that I didn't do my usual series of tracking results in 2018. Eventually the 2017 teams did enter the simulator and I did run through that playoff. But the 2018 teams didn't get input until months after the college football season ended, so while I tracked the numbers last season and built a bracket, I wasn't able to simulate the postseason in real time. That feature will come sometime this fall or early winter; possibly as an appetizer to the 2019 Death to the BCS Playoffs that will go on... it's just a question of when.

You can click on the above link for last year's bracket to view how I build out the postseason bracket, but the CliffNotes version is this: all ten conference champions get an automatic bid, with six at large bids to fill out the field. I pick those teams and seed everyone based on a number of metrics: one I built myself for non-conference scheduling, one I borrowed from the IHSA (then a couple that derive from it), and a trio of computer rankings that factor margin of victory into the equation. I'll go into more specifics come December after the championship games are in the books and I'm ready to unveil the bracket.

But before I leave it at that for the fall, I also want to make a couple things clear about eligibility, and to an extent this is where my non-conference metric comes in. I've railed against FCS games to some degree; I get their purpose and in the grand scheme of things they don't hurt anybody. But any team that plays two FCS opponents (except in a circumstance where a game gets cancelled and they need to fill it at the last minute with a second FCS team) will be suspended from the postseason. Additionally, a few other teams are also at least partially ineligible for this year. Ohio State, despite Urban Meyer having ridden off into the sunset and the offending assistant having long since been removed, is currently under an at large suspension from the Death to the BCS Playoffs. This means that if they win the Big Ten, they will make it in, but that is their only route to the playoffs; they cannot be considered for an at large bid. This suspension is in effect through the 2020 season, at which point they will regain full eligibility.

The same can't be said for two other programs, and regular readers of Confessions of a Sportscaster will know where I'm going with this. Baylor is permanently banned from the Death to the BCS Playoffs for a pattern of covering up sexual assault cases to protect the football program. Similarly, (and you know this is the big one), Penn State is permanently banned from the Death to the BCS Playoffs for being a cult that prioritized football over the well being of children. I will still calculate their metrics, and games against these teams will still count for the purpose of metric gathering, but they will not be considered for postseason play.

If you are curious to see where your team might stand at any point in the year, you can view that here. I will do my best to update this weekly. Good luck to your teams this fall!