College Football: How a 16-Team FBS Playoff Might Work

I'm going to leave my anti-bowl rant for later in the week, as the 20th approaches. Not that the bowls shouldn't exist; after all, 6-6 teams need some reason to feel good...

No, that's not it. It's the excitement and the drama of a knockout playoff to bring the best teams in the nation to fight it out, unshackled by conference affiliations and (after the first round kicks off) untainted by the "beauty contest" aspect of the polls.

Leave it all on the field.

16-TEAM PLAYOFF BRACKET (seeded)

BCS conference winners seeded 1-6 according to BCS ranking of Week 15 (Dec. 7);
Non-BCS conference winners seeded next according to BCS ranking (if in Top 25);
Remaining teams considered “at-large” and seeded according to BCS ranking.

1. Oklahoma (BCS 1)
2. Florida (BCS 2)
3. USC (BCS 5)
4. Penn State (BCS 8)
5. Cincinnati (BCS 12)
6. Virginia Tech (BCS 19)
7. Utah (BCS 6)
8. Boise State (BCS 9)
9. Texas (BCS 3)
10. Alabama (BCS 4)
11. Texas Tech (BCS 7)
12. Ohio State (BCS 10)
13. TCU (BCS 11)
14. Oklahoma State (BCS 13)
15. Georgia Tech (BCS 14)
16. Georgia (BCS 15)

Team “bumped” from the playoff due to Virginia Tech's inclusion: BYU (BCS 16).

Buffalo (MAC), East Carolina (C-USA), and Troy (Sun Belt), the three remaining FBS conference champions, are not in the BCS Top 25 and are thus ineligible for the playoff.

Other rankings could conceivably be used, but the AP has already asked out of being used to determine participants in the BCS and is likely to do so with the playoff scenario as well.

Using the final pre-bowl BCS ranking represents a compromise to ensure the BCS conferences retain some measure of influence in the process (though not overwhelmingly so as they do now). The seeding of the six BCS conferences as 1-6 in the bracket is the only other concession.

This sort of playoff may come about as the result of political action by the United States Congress, financial incentives from major media interests (such as ESPN, CBS College Sports, etc.), and public pressure from sports fans disappointed with the purgatory that is the BCS—neither the status quo ante (a dozen "big" traditional bowls, with no attempt to create a playoff), nor the utopian "pure" playoff system free of any BCS involvement (seeding without regard to BCS conference affiliation).

What this represents is politics as the art of compromise, and sport as the art of  competition. There are fairer and finer ways of bringing the FBS college football season to a close, and this is one small contribution to that end.

So, in addition to my previous article (one of my first on Bleacher Report) outlining the possibilities for a pragmatic, workable, eight-team playoff, I shall now present an equally pragmatic, workable example of a 16-team playoff.

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