Mission Statement

One of the major arguments against a college football playoff is that "a playoff would ruin the regular season". In this blog, I will conduct a thought experiment to see whether that is true or not. The assumption is that the playoff is constructed as follows:

1) Sixteen-team playoff. The playoff is the very similar to the system used in “The Wetzel Plan” outline by YahooSports writer Dan Wetzel. The only differences are there would be no weeks skipped for exams, holiday, etc. The NCAA doesn’t really care about academics, so why would that change? The other is that instead of ranking the teams 1-16, two regions (East and West) are created and ranked 1-8. This allows some room to make sure there are no intra-conference matchups in the early rounds.

2) At-large bids will be decided in a similar way that they are in college basketball. RPI, good wins, and bad losses would factor into the system.

3) Conference championship games will not count in regards to selection for the tournament. However, they will count for seeding in the tournament. My reasoning is to not punish teams too severely for losing an extra game that they had to play in as a reward for winning their division.

4) Strong non-conference scheduling will be rewarded. Weak non-conference scheduling will be punished. Beating a good opponent by a small margin will be looked upon with more favor than beating a poor opponent by large margin.

5) Wins over Division I-AA opponents do not count towards win totals on the season. This means a team like Clemson only has ten games in my eyes this year, as they play only two I-A opponents in their non-conference schedule.

Now, what differences can readers of this blog expect compared all other college football coverage? Basically, the focus will be on making the tournament, not making bowl games. That means the focus will be on reaching greatness, not mediocrity. I intend to have weekly posts of the bracket (Monday), a look at the conference races (Tuesday-Thursday), and a preview of the big games each week (Friday-ish).

At the end of the season, there will be a fictional playoff. It will be played on “Second and Ten”, and excellent college football simulator published by Roogames. It will begin the week after the conference championship games, with the final bracket being released on Sunday night. For this year, the schedule looks like:

December 12-13: First round games at campus sites

December 20: Quarter-final games at campus sites

December 27: Semi-final games at campus sites

January 3: National Championship game, TBA

The one question I have for any readers who stumble across this blog is this: Where should the National Championship game be held. The other divisions in college football have set sites where the game is held each year, so should D-IA do that? Or should the game be shopped around, like the Super Bowl in the NFL is each year?

In closing, College Football Bracketology has one goal: To help destroy the BCS and have a playoff instituted in it’s place. I realize that it won’t be a quick or easy process. In fact, I may not even have an impact at all. However, I feel that the question "Would a playoff ruin the regular season?" should not be debated endlessly by the MSM's talking heads or by people on message boards flinging virtual mud. Instead, I feel that this simple experiment will help to answer that question.