One of my ideas for what college football could do to keep making money was to completely divorce itself from the NCAA, preventing an all-sports split by the big-name schools, allowing the NCAA to focus on lesser sports, and most relevantly to this discussion, allowing conference realignment to proceed without affecting the lesser sports. With that in mind, I propose this fairly radical idea for conference realignment in a post-NCAA college football universe.

This idea can be summed up in three words: Promotion and relegation.

Fans of European club soccer, whether newcomers or old standbys, inevitably become fascinated by and enamored of the promotion and relegation system. Newcomers wonder what would happen if it were applied to American sports; old standbys insist that America’s own soccer league, MLS, adopt it. In both cases, they wildly underestimate the deep philosophical differences between American and European sports that explain the existence of the promotion and relegation system.

Europe places more emphasis on the individual teams as the bedrock of the league, as opposed to American sports where the teams’ power ultimately derives from the league. By the same token, Europe isn’t as obsessed with parity as the United States, and the assumption of the promotion and relegation system is that the teams at the bottom are substantially worse than the teams at the top. You couldn’t have a player draft in a promotion and relegation system, nor would team owners be likely to accept the possibility of being moved up and down every year, with the millions of dollars at stake. If baseball adopted pro/rel, the Yankees and Red Sox would become even more powerful than everyone else.

But guess what one American sport the above doesn’t apply to? College football’s power, as has been proved time and again, derives from its individual teams, not from any central source, and ultimately could care less about parity. A promotion and relegation system would give the lesser teams a bigger slice of the college football pie, create better matchups throughout the season, and ultimately solve college football’s championship problem, while surprisingly keeping much that makes the sport great.

Here’s how I could see it playing out. The big schools start making noise about separating from the NCAA, while their 16-team superconference dreams start coming to fruition and they start making noise about a de facto playoff. The schools left threaten to, or actually do, sue the big schools for monopolizing the college football pie. The big schools reach an agreement with the small schools and the NCAA that theoretically allows any school in the country, even NAIA Podunk U, to some day compete with the big boys at the top level of the sport, but effectively ensconces the power of the big schools at the top of the sport, while creating a better experience for the fans. Everyone wins.

What would this system look like? At the top level, I see two 12-team conferences composed of the biggest-name, best programs in the country – call them the SEC and Big 10. These add up to 24 teams, very close to the “Top 25″ we’re so used to. Unlike current 12-team conferences, every team plays every other team one time, with no divisional arrangement. Under the current schedule, that leaves one game for a team to schedule a cupcake or a cross-conference or interlevel rival, preserving most rivalries between teams of comparable power while creating a far more exciting season full of big matchups. The champions of the two 12-team conferences then meet in a single game at the end of the season to determine college football’s national champion, solving the championship problem while preserving the sanctity of the bowls (for example, second place in each league could play each other as well).

The top four levels are important in this plan, as those levels are the ones that can tell recruits that, at least theoretically, they can someday play at that top level. Thus, the next few levels are arranged so that the top four levels total 120, same as Division I-A today. I see another two 12-team conferences at the second level (the ACC and Pac-12), then three conferences each at the third (Big East, Mountain West, Conference USA) and fourth (WAC, MAC, Sun Belt) levels. (These names are just for show, and to indicate the general geographic area each conference would cover.) The fifth level, where I-AA would essentially start, would then consist of four conferences, and so on down the line.

The bottom one or two teams in each top-level conference are relegated, with the champions and possibly runners-up in each second-level conference promoted. Perhaps the 11th-place teams in each conference could hold a play-off to determine who gets relegated, while the second-place teams at the second level hold their own, similar game to determine who gets promoted. Similarly, the last-place teams in each second-level conference are relegated, with a play-off between the 11th-place teams, while the champions of the three third-level conferences promoted.

What would these conferences look like at the top level? Here’s one way they might be arranged, with reference to Stewart Mandel’s 2007 column on college football’s “kings” and recent on-the-field success:

The Southeastern Conference

1. Alabama
2. Auburn
3. Florida
4. Florida State
5. Georgia
6. LSU
7. Oklahoma
8. South Carolina
9. Texas
10. TCU
11. Virginia Tech
12. West Virginia

The Northern and Western Conference (aka the “Big 12″)

1. Boise State
2. BYU
3. Michigan
4. Nebraska
5. Notre Dame
6. Ohio State
7. Oregon
8. Penn State
9. Pittsburgh
10. USC
11. Utah
12. Wisconsin

Look at all the rivalries that are preserved. Michigan/Ohio State, Oklahoma/Texas, Auburn/Alabama, Florida/Florida State, USC/Notre Dame, and so on down the line. There are even some new rivalries like Penn State/Pittsburgh, on top of all the other great games created with these top-notch programs. The extra game for inter-conference rivalries also allows us to preserve such games as Florida State/Miami (FL), Michigan/Michigan State, USC/UCLA, Oregon/Oregon State, Oklahoma/Oklahoma State, Texas/Texas A&M, South Carolina/Clemson, Georgia/Georgia Tech, and Virginia/Virginia Tech. The other thing to note is that, unlike in today’s conferences and even in European soccer, most if not all of these teams have large, devoted followings in their own right, large enough to merit their own per-school TV contracts with the networks and ESPN. There are no Longhorn Network controversies with this group. And some superb teams and programs will be relegated to the second tier at the end of the year.

What of the second tier? What do those conferences look like?

The Atlantic Conference

1. Arizona State
2. Arkansas
3. Cincinnati
4. Clemson
5. Connecticut
6. Georgia Tech
7. Iowa
8. Miami (FL)
9. Michigan State
10. Mississippi
11. Texas A&M
12. Texas Tech

The Pacific Conference

1. Air Force
2. Arizona
3. Arizona State
4. California
5. Colorado
6. Missouri
7. Nevada
8. Oklahoma State
9. Oregon State
10. Stanford
11. UCLA
12. Washington

Here are a bunch of lesser powers that could probably carry a pair of conference-wide contracts with ESPN2 and a considerable audience despite not being top-tier. That’s four conferences’ worth of great teams and great matchups on two tiers. For completeness’ sake, here’s what the third tier would look like:

Big East Conference

1. Army
2. Boston College
3. Illinois
4. Louisville
5. Maryland
6. Navy
7. Northern Illinois
8. Northwestern
9. Ohio
10. Purdue
11. Rutgers
12. Temple

Conference USA

1. Central Florida
2. East Carolina
3. Kentucky
4. Mississippi State
5. North Carolina
6. NC State
7. South Florida
8. Southern Miss
9. Tennessee
10. Troy
11. Vanderbilt
12. Virginia

Mountain West Conference

1. Baylor
2. Fresno State
3. Hawaii
4. Houston
5. Idaho
6. Kansas
7. Kansas State
8. Minnesota
9. San Diego State
10. SMU
11. Tulsa
12. UTEP

These conferences aren’t quite of the caliber of the previous tiers, with only a few teams able to carry their weight in TV contracts for the occasional ESPNU game, hence why there are three of them in more compact geographic areas. (Washington State, Iowa State, and Syracuse have some claim to being in this group. Most of the remaining I-A schools are on the fourth tier, with Appalachian State, Montana, and one or two more I-AA interlopers replacing some weak Sun Belt schools.)

A showcase for all the best teams in the country to play each other week after week, competing for national glory and to stay in that brutal competition. Opportunity for any team to rise to the top. No more cupcakes and a college football national championship everyone can agree on. Now, isn’t this a far better picture for college football than franken-conferences and the BCS?

First college football rankings should be coming later today.

The Golden Bowl tournament, however, is probably not going to happen this year, and maybe ever. Somehow it has always managed to monopolize a lot of my time during every winter break, and the process of selection chews up a lot of time and brainpower just as the fall quarter at school starts ramping up towards finals. Perhaps once I’m finally out of school I’ll start it up again – heaven knows we’ll probably be no closer to a playoff then. I do want to say a few things about how the bracket would have shaken out:

The top six teams in the RPI are all from the SEC or Big 12, with attendant effects on selection, including Oklahoma probably getting a top-three seed, a possible third SEC at-large in Alabama, and all other conferences getting squeezed out of at-larges, including Stanford and Ohio State. Had I decided to cap at-larges at 2 per conference, they and Michigan State would have been key contenders.

Thanks in part to my Rose Bowl Semifinal rule, Oregon is hard-pressed to even get a first-round home game; the Pac-10 was weak this year. Wisconsin barely stood out among a field of Oregon, TCU, Boise, and V-Tech.

Finally, Connecticut actually barely got edged by UCF for the 13 seed, so the 3 would be a lot less valuable than the 2 this year, and the 4 substantially more valuable than the 5.

For the Playoff Pictures, anything that’s not self-explanatory is in the notes. Thick borders cannot be crossed, and I didn’t bother to research common-games tiebreakers for playoff positioning.

AFC Playoff Picture

DIVISION LEADERS	WILD CARD	NOTES
SOUTH 49-6	511-4	ONLY AFC SOUTH CONTENDERS HAVE NOT CLINCHED PLAYOFF SPOT
8-7
WEST 310-5	610-5
CLINCHED
NORTH 211-4		STILL POSSIBLE:
11-4		511-5
EAST 113-2		611-5
CLINCHED

NFC Playoff Picture

DIVISION LEADERS	WILD CARD	NOTES
WEST 47-8	511-4	PACKERS BEAT GIANTS AND WIN COMMON GAMES OVER BUCS
6-9
EAST 310-5	69-6
9-6
NORTH 211-4	9-6
CLINCHED	9-6
SOUTH 112-3
11-4
OUT ON TIEBREAKERS CLINCHED PLAYOFF SPOT

Why? In college football, you can go .500, go to a bowl game, and save your job. In college basketball, it’s NCAA Tournament or bust – you have to be in the top 18% of teams in the country to save your job.

Here’s the thing: you may be able to go .500 and save your job, but that doesn’t mean anyone gives a bleep about your team. Most people only care about the undefeated and one-loss teams in the thick of the national championship hunt, and if they’re really diehard, the races at the top of the BCS conferences. Any smart playoff proposal will keep the bowls in some way, and it’s not like people care that much about the teams that wouldn’t be in the playoff anyway, so how exactly would it change the status quo?

And why shouldn’t college basketball be any different from college football, the NBA, or the NHL? Why shouldn’t the NIT, CBI, or CIT be enough for a coach to keep their job, and why shouldn’t merely making the NCAA Tournament be good enough for a coach to get a hefty extension?

You know what I think the problem is? I think the problem is that, unlike in college football, the mid-majors really are the majority. The BCS conferences really do select a third to a half of their teams to the NCAA Tournament as is, so in that sense, it makes sense for them to say “NCAA Tournament or bust”. In that sense, it’s heartening to see the number of at-large spots given to mid-majors double this year, even if it was only because the Pac-10 sucked. Improving parity will make the NCAA Tournament feel more special and give more respect to the NIT. Expanding the tournament, on the other hand, will only worsen and entrench the “NCAA Tournament or bust” dictum given to BCS-conference coaches, while making the tournament feel less special.

(It’ll also render schedule irrelevant. Am I really supposed to believe that the 32 teams just outside the NCAAs are dominated by major conference teams, but magically, there’s only one major-conference team in the next 32 and it’s from the Pac-10? Do we really want every Tom, Dick, and Harry that goes .500 to almost automatically get to the Big Dance?

TCU returns the opening kickoff to their own 40, and gain even more yardage when Alabama gets nailed for encroachment, the second straight year the Golden Bowl starts with the SEC team being nailed for encroachment before the first play from scrimmage. Last time Stafon Johnson got nailed behind the line; this year Joseph Turner gets out-of-bounds after getting just past midfield for the first. Turner picks up another two yards before Andy Dalton floats it out to Jeremy Kerley just past the marker. But the drive stalls: Tucker gets nailed behind the line, a toss to Bart Johnson just gets back to the line of scrimmage, and another pass attempt gets batted down at the line. With the ball at the 41, the Horned Frogs elect to punt, but the punt goes into the end zone.

Trent Richardson gains 16 yards on the pitch to put the Tide right into business. Mark Ingram is not as successful, only gaining one yard on his first carry, but six on his second, but gets overthrown on a third-down pass play, forcing the Tide to punt the ball back, a play that goes from the Tide 43 to the Frog 42. Matthew Tucker gets stopped at the line of scrimmage but Turner gains three, but Dalton scrambles back to the line of scrimmage to force another punt. Richardson gets runs of two and three yards before Greg McIlroy’s first completed pass of the day is to Colin Peek for a good ten yards. Ingram only gains one yard the next play, and when he’s given the ball again it’s nullified by a holding penalty. But that’s nothing compared to when McIlroy hands the ball off to Roy Upchurch only to see him lose the ball, giving TCU the ball on the Tide 43. But Turner gains two, Tucker only gets back to the line, Dalton throws an incompletion, and TCU punts the ball into the end zone again. The defenses are stout with a little over five minutes left in the first quarter.

Ingram gets a couple of two-yard gains, with Alabama saving a fumble on the second, but a screen pass to Marquis Maze doesn’t quite get back to the line, forcing another punt and another TCU short field. Tucker is given the ball on a draw and takes it up five yards, but that’s nothing compared to what happens when the ball is given to Edward Wesley: he immediately breaks past the defense and takes it 55 yards for the touchdown. TCU 7: Florida 0.

Alabama returns the ensuing kickoff to the 23, and Richardson goes nowhere on first down, Ingram only gains six, and Upchurch is stopped after one, forcing another punt. TCU, as on the last drive, gets the ball on their own 40, and gives the ball to Turner for five yards. Wesley gains only three yards this time but it sets up Turner to cross midfield and pick up the first down. Tucker gets stopped at the line to end the quarter.

Wesley gains two to start the quarter before Dalton connects with Kerley to the 27, the furthest downfield either team has run a play. Wesley gets stuffed at the line on first down and takes it for four on second, and Jercell Fort can only get three on third. But Ross Evans comes on and lets a 37-yard field goal attempt sail through the uprights, extending the lead. Alabama returns the ensuing kickoff to the 28, and Ingram immediately picks up 11 yards and the first down. Ingram picks up one the next play, Richardson picks up six on the draw, and Ingram just picks up the first down. Upchurch gets runs of threee and four yards, but on third and three Terry Grant can only gain one, and Alabama is forced to punt again. But they did manage to cross midfield, and their punter is able to pin the Frogs at the 8.

Fort gets a big 12-yard gain to give the Frogs some breathing room, but Turner only gets two, Tucker three, and Dalton overthrows his intended receiver on third down, and the ensuing punt is returned to the Alabama 47. Grant immediately breaks out a 20-yard run to put them at the 33. After Ingram, Richardson, and Grant each inch the ball a few yards closer, it’s 4th and 3 and Leigh Tiffin comes on for a 43-yard field goal attempt. The ball slips inside the upright and Alabama is back within a touchdown. The ensuing kickoff is caught at the 7 and returned to the 37, but Wesley, Fort and Dalton gain two, two, and three respectively, and Alabama gets the ball back at the same spot as before. Ingram gets nailed for a loss of five and a pass to Julio Jones just gets back to the line, but McIlroy throws it to Jones again and he breaks out a 30-yard run to the 28. Ingram takes it another six yards but McIlroy is forced to scramble for a yard on second and has his pass batted down on third, forcing a successful 38-yard field goal to cut the deficit to four.

TCU gets an even shorter kickoff, catching it at the 14, but only take it to the 35. Tucker and Dalton only gain a yard each and Dalton gets nailed for the only sack either side had all day, and once again Alabama gets the ball past their own 40. Ingram once again sees a short gain negated by holding, then sees McIlroy overthrow him on the play that counts. Ingram gets stuffed and McIlroy unsuccessfully lobs it up on third down. Dalton uses up the remaining time with one last hail-mary pass, but the Horned Frogs still head into the break up 10-6, although Alabama seems to have the momentum.

Alabama gets the ball on their own 29 to start the second half and immediately come running out the gate, with Ingram picking up six yards the first play from scrimmage. Two runs by Richardson pick up the first down, followed by a six-yard run of his own and another first down on an encroachment penalty. But while Ingram picks up a yard, Upchurch gets nailed behind midfield to make it 3rd and 12, and McIlroy throws an incompletion to force a punt. TCU is pinned on the 18, but Dalton calls his own number for five yards, followed by a 6-yard pickup by Tucker for the first. But Wesley gets nailed behind the line, Turner only gets back to the line, and Dalton is forced to scramble, forcing another punt. The punt is only returned to the 37 but Ingram immediately picks up 5 yards. Upchurch is stopped just short of the marker, setting up Ingram for another 5-yard run to just past midfield. Maze gets a screen pass that is stopped at the line, and Richardson picks up four before Ingram bursts through for 13 yards, putting the Tide at the 32. He gains another five yards to put them inside the 30, and Grant adds another two. But the toss to Colin Peek loses a yard, which may prove crucial when the Tide try a 43-yard field goal attempt that sails to the left, keeping the deficit at four instead of one.

But Turner and Tucker don’t do much and Dalton throws another incompletion, and the ensuing punt puts the Tide just barely behind midfield. But Grant only picks up two and Ingram one, and another toss to Peek doesn’t do anything, and the ensuing punt gets returned all the way to the 20 – another wasted opportunity. Turner pounds for 11 yards but Wesley, Fort, and Turner can’t combine for another first down before the quarter ends, giving TCU fourth and one. The punt, however, is only taken to the 35.

Ingram and Richardson don’t gain much but it’s enough to create third and two after an encroachment penalty, but Ingram only gets back to the line and Alabama punts again. This time TCU gets it on their own 32. Turner picks up a yard and Fort gets nailed for a loss of three, but Dalton connects with Johnson for 14 yards and the first. Turner and Tucker once again are stuffed and Dalton throws another incompletion, forcing yet another punt – this one only returned to the 26. Ingram gets 2, Upchurch gets 5, and Grant loses 2, and the ensuing punt is taken to the 44. TCU is suddenly winning the field position battle, which is not what Alabama wants exchanging three-and-outs and behind.

Turner picks up six yards to midfield, but Tucker only gains two and Turner goes nowhere, but the Tide get the ball back at the 21. Richardson gets nailed at the 16, but Ingram’s two-yarder sets up an encroachment penalty that nullifies the loss, setting up a pass to Maze for 14 yards and the first. But after Ingram gains four, Richardson and Upchurch are stalled, and with 4:52 left Alabama punts it back to TCU, who get it at the 33. Wesley gets the ball on two draw plays bracketing an incompletion, the second for 12 yards, but Turner, Fort, and Dalton get nowhere, and Alabama gets one last chance to come back from the 26 with two minutes left.

The drive starts well, as Ingram picks up 14 immediately on a draw play that gets out of bounds. But Richardson loses three yards, and McIlroy can’t find anyone downfield and scrambles out of bounds at the line of scrimmage, setting up third and 13 with 1:43 left on the 37. Incredibly, Nick Saban returns to the run, and even after Grant is stuffed behind the line to set up fourth and 14, calls a draw play to Grant. Alabama gives the ball back with 1:36 left and two timeouts, and they use them for a heroic stop. Dalton takes off himself to gain two – timeout, 1:32 left. Wesley picks up two – timeout, 1:28 left. Fort is stopped at the line, and TCU, caught in “no man’s land”, only runs the clock down to one minute before Dalton takes the ball and is stopped at the 35, not far from where Alabama left off.

This time Saban entrusts McIlroy with the game, and he doesn’t disappoint, hitting Peek at the marker, and spiking the ball to stop the clock with 37 seconds left. McIlroy steps back, quickly throws it to Richardson… out of his reach. 31 seconds. McIlroy is forced out of the pocket and sprints out of bounds for a meaningless yard. 25 seconds, fourth and nine, ball game comes down to this play. McIlroy steps back and stays in the pocket for several seconds. Finally he throws it up to Peek…

…and over his head.

Dalton takes victory formation to seal Alabama’s doom and a stunning victory for college football’s “little guys”. Unsurprisingly for such a run- and defense-heavy game, it’s a running back that takes MVP, and Wesley gets it almost by default for by far the longest play of the game, and only touchdown. He ran the ball 10 more times for 31 more yards, but the play everyone will remember was the one that was key to the game, the only time anyone seemed to figure out the other’s defense.
Final score: TCU 10, Florida 6

Cincinnati had the ball to start the game, and Tony Pike had a 15-yard completion to Mardy Gilyard on second down, followed by an Isaiah Pead run to midfield for six yards, but he was stopped behind the line on second down and the Bearcats were forced to punt. TCU went three-and-out with a fumble and Cincinnati looked to have the early momentum. But they went three-and-out as well, and on the Frogs’ next play from scrimmage Joseph Turner pounded ahead for an 18-yard gain, putting TCU across midfield after a face mask penalty. TCU couldn’t do anything and was forced to punt, but Cincinnati didn’t get very far either despite an 11-yard Pead run and an 8-yard run by Jacob Ramsey that both went for first downs. TCU went three-and-out again, but Pike was picked on the very next play, and TCU had the momentum for good. Andy Dalton made a long completion to Jeremy Kerley, and Matt Tucker pounded ahead for a six-yard touchdown to take the early lead. The teams traded three-and-outs across the quarter break.

Cincinnati managed to pick up a first down but a big sack of Pike helped force a punt despite crossing midfield. A Dalton pass to Evan Frosch and 7-yard Tucker run crossed midfield, but the drive stalled and TCU punted the ball back. But after the defense forces yet another three-and-out, the ensuing punt is returned almost to midfield, and a completion to Bart Johnson for 23 yards pretty much puts the Horned Frogs in field goal range, allowing them to take a 10-point lead. The Bearcats then engage in their most productive drive of the half: after a second down sack pinned the Bearcats behind their own 20, Pike makes a 27-yard completion to Gilyard and follows that up with a 15-yard Pead run and a 17-yard completion to Ben Guidugli that puts them inside the 30. But a Ramsey 8-yard run is negated by an illegal motion penalty the following play, and Pike is sacked out of field goal range on third down, forcing a turnover on downs. Dalton makes a long completion to Logan Brock but can’t do anything with it, but while Guidugli makes a long completion there isn’t enough time to do anything with it. Cincinnati enters the break down 10-0 and unable to so much as attempt a field goal, and pundits note that TCU is winning the game because their defense is outplaying the Bearcat defense.

TCU gets the ball to start the second half and makes the most of it, the highlights being a long completion to Kerley and Dalton dancing inside the pylon for eight yards, ultimately setting up a field goal that gives TCU a 13-point lead that seems twice that size. Things seem to go well for Cincinnati at first as well, with a 25-yard completion to DJ Woods, but another pass to Armon Binns results in what replay confirms as a fumble, giving TCU the ball right back. TCU can’t do much more than a pass to Johnson across midfield, and punts the ball into the end zone, starting another productive Bearcat drive, starting with another long completion to Gilyard, 17 yards on third and 12. Jamar Howard gets involved for the next first down, and Gilyard makes a nine-yard completion for another first down, but once again the Horned Frogs lock down inside the 40 and force Cincinnati to go for it on fourth down, this time getting a sack that gives TCU great field position to start the final period. By the end of the day, Pike is sacked nine times by eight different players and, combined with four rushing attempts, loses a total of a whopping 62 yards on the ground by himself. Turner would be named the MVP for his 17 rushes for 81 yards and a touchdown, emblematic of TCU’s overall rushing success, but the defense is the real star of the day.

TCU misses the field goal created by the turnover, but Pike throws his second interception, Ross Evans quickly redeems himself, and TCU, as though they weren’t in command already, puts the game away for the remainder of the final period, scoring a touchdown after Cincinnati punts on their next drive only to see it returned inside the 30, and scoring another touchdown, Turner’s, later on. Cincinnati is unable to score all day, or even attempt a field goal, and notice is served to Alabama and Texas that they do not have the de facto national championship game.
Final score: TCU 30, Cincinnati 0

Preview of the Golden Bowl coming either if and when I simulate a bowl only affected by the Golden Bowl Tournament, or when posting my final rankings.

Miami picked up two first downs the rest of the half and another big punt return set up a Tide field goal to give Alabama a 16-10 halftime lead, still not insurmountable, and indeed Brad Smelley coughs up the football on Alabama’s first drive of the second half. But the defense forces yet another three-and-out, Bama gets another big punt return (though Leigh Tiffin can’t convert from 50 this time), and on Bama’s next drive a big completion to Darius Hanks and a 16-yard Richardson run helps set up a successful try from 28 yards. Then Bama forces another three-and-out and blocks the punt outright, setting up an Ingram touchdown and sending people filing for the exits, even with Miami only down two scores. Miami finally picks up a first down late in the quarter but can’t do anything with it, and their only serious comeback attempt starts with 4:22 left on the clock, after Bama has added another touchdown. Harris drives the Canes to the Tide 24, but gets picked off on fourth down. Ingram is the player of the game again with 205 yards on 27 carries, including two of over 20 yards, and two touchdowns.
Final score: Miami (FL) 10, Alabama 33

#7 Iowa v. #2 Cincinnati
So apparently if Cincinnati were playing for the national championship Brian Kelly would have continued coaching the Bearcats and made Notre Dame wait. One more example of how the Golden Bowl changes college football history, and Exhibit A for how the BCS keeps smaller schools down. And good thing, because like Cincinnati’s quarterfinal game last year, the Bearcats would need everything they could get.

Iowa returns the opening kickoff to the 37 and picks up a first down and moves into Bearcat territory. But the drive is stuffed, Iowa punts, and Tony Pike goes 4-for-5 on the ensuing 71-yard field goal drive. Iowa is pinned at the 19, called for holding, and forced to punt, which the Bearcats return to the 43, setting up a 41-yard field goal attempt. The kick is no good, but Ricky Stanzi gets picked off and the Bearcats end the quarter with first-and-ten on the Hawkeye 16 and about to win this one going away. But Pike can’t complete three straight passes and the Bearcats are forced to settle for a field goal. No problem: the defense has the Hawkeyes bottled up… except they don’t. Stanzi goes 4-for-4 with two passes of over 20 yards as he leads the Hawkeyes on a 79-yard touchdown drive. Iowa 7: Cincinnati 6.

Pike gets a big completion to Mardy Gilyard for the first down, but once again fails to complete three straight passes and is forced to punt. Iowa responds by driving all the way to the Bearcat 17, where Daniel Murray shanks a 34-yard field goal wide left. Suddenly the Hawkeyes seem to have all the momentum in the quarter. Pike leads the Bearcats on a long drive, going 6 for his first 7 passes en route to the Hawkeye 15, but gets picked off and, despite another missed Murray field goal to end the half (this one from 58 yards), Iowa leads Cincinnati heading into the break.

Another shock awaits to start the second half: Zach Collaros taking over at quarterback. All the stories of how Kelly’s tough love saved Pike’s career, and it’s looking to have a disappointing ending. After the kickoff is returned inside the Bearcat 40, Collaros goes 4 for 5 and completes the Bearcats’ first touchdown, retaking a 13-7 lead. Iowa responds on their next drive: pinned on their own 10 by a holding penalty on the kickoff, Adam Robinson immediately breaks off a 49-yard run, helping set up a 31-yard field goal that makes it through the uprights this time. After the ensuing kickoff is returned inside the 40 again, Kelly puts Pike back in, and he promptly completes long passes to Gilyard and Ben Guidugli to put the ball at the 27. The next three plays, though, are an incompletion, a scramble, and an incompletion, and to add insult to injury the 42-yard field goal attempt bounces off the upright.

Iowa strikes right back with long runs by Robinson and Brandon Wegher, but for the last four minutes of the quarter the quarterbacks catch interception fever. Stanzi gets picked when the Hawkeyes have made it to the Bearcat 11, and a long completion to Armon Binns and unnecessary roughness penalty against the Hawkeyes basically put the Bearcats inside Iowa territory again, but Pike throws a pick of his own… only for Stanzi to get picked again on the very next play. Pike starts the next quarter with a 14-yard completion to Gilyard to set up first and goal, but once again misses both of his pass attempts, forcing a field goal. Cincinnati still leads 16-10, but how tempted must Kelly be to put Collaros back in?

Stanzi completes three out of three passes on the ensuing drive and Paki O’Meara gets a huge 14 yard run to the 30, but after that the drive stalls and the 39-yard field goal attempt doesn’t make it. Pike’s job now is simply to run as much time off the clock as he can, which he and the running game do admirably. It’s a surprisingly pass-heavy drive, but Pike’s receivers are smart enough to stay inbounds, it’s hard to blame the stall of the drive on Pike, and once the 46-yard field goal splits the uprights to increase the lead to nine, there’s only 5:43 left to make up a two-score deficit. But Iowa’s ensuing drive starts beautifully: Stanzi to Marvin McNutt, 12 yards, first down. Wegher picks up 15 yards on a draw, first down. Iowa runs the same play and gets stopped for two yards, but the defense gets flagged for unnecessary roughness: 15 yards, automatic first down. Just like that, Iowa has the ball on the 20 with 4:38 left. Stanzi throws his first two passes not caught by a member of either team  since 8:11 remained in the third quarter, but completes it on third down to Derrell Johnson-Koulianos, who just stretches across the first-down marker. One Robinson run later, and Iowa is within two.

With four minutes left, Kirk Ferentz shows a tremendous amount of trust in his defense – despite the fact that they have typically only stopped Pike when they got close to the end zone – by kicking the ball away. This will be one of the most important drives of the game. Jacob Ramsey starts the clock-milking with a 7-yard draw, and Pike picks up the first down with an 11-yard completion to Robinson – already a minute has gone off the clock. Pike throws an incompletion, but then hits Marcus Barnett to midfield two yards short of the marker, and Isaiah Pead picks up another 13 yards for the first down. With less than two minutes left, Iowa calls one of its two remaining timeouts after Ramsey picks up another six yards, setting up 2nd and 4. Pike steps back to pass, hands the ball off to Pead…

…who promptly breaks through the defense for 13 yards.

There will be many stories told about the game: Gilyard’s 130 yards on just seven catches, the Hawkeye defense nearly justifying Big Ten love and big East hate, questions as to whether Collaros will get more playing time in the next round, Ferentz’s gamble that didn’t pay off. But the bottom line is, Cincinnati is in the next round, and Iowa is not… and like a lot of things about the Hawkeyes’ season, it doesn’t matter how they got there.
Final score: Iowa 17, Cincinnati 19

#6 TCU v. #3 Florida
The big breaking news story the day of the game is Urban Meyer’s decision to leave Florida once the Gators are done playing. Meyer would soften his position the next day to a “leave of absence”, but people don’t know that yet, and as far as anyone knows this isn’t just Tim Tebow’s last game in the Swamp, but Meyer’s as well, and the Gators owe it to everyone in attendance to give them a great game.

They don’t get it.

Oh, for most of the way it’s close. But the tone was really set on the opening drive when Andy Dalton hit Bart Johnson for 35 yards, followed by Matthew Tucker opening up a 37-yard touchdown run. After that it becomes a defensive battle, with neither team doing much of anything until three minutes into the second period, when Chris Rainey broke open a 42-yard touchdown run to tie the game. But TCU gets the ball near the 40 on the ensuing kickoff and Joseph Turner breaks open a 55-yard run to the 7, seemingly setting up an easy touchdown, but Matthew Tucker gets nailed behind the line on third and goal from the 4 to force a field goal to re-take the lead. Another 55-yard run, this time by Tucker, sets up another field goal to increase the lead to six, and the main reason TCU doesn’t get another on the next drive is because the punt that set it up pinned them at the two. TCU misses another field goal attempt before the half, but the momentum is clearly in the Horned Frogs’ favor.

On TCU’s first drive of the half, helped by big runs from Turner and Ed Wesley, the Frogs tack on another field goal. Tebow calls his own number on a draw play on the Gators’ first play from scrimmage on the ensuing drive, picking up 23 yards, but it starts nothing. The teams trade three-and-outs for most of the rest of the quarter, before a TCU drive picks up some first downs but stalls at midfield. But they return Florida’s punt back to midfield, and a 23-yard completion from Dalton to Wesley helps set up a touchdown that puts the Horned Frogs up 16 and effectively puts the game away. After the teams trade three-and-outs, Tebow attempts to run for the first down on 4th and 5, but gets nowhere, setting up a field goal. Turner tacks on a 27-yard touchdown run late to add more insult to injury – appropriate that the man who ran 18 times for 155 yards would add a touchdown as well. The Gators finally get a drive going, but it’s 33-7 with 2:31 left, and Tebow is shown crying on the sidelines as Dalton takes the final knees, justifying the presence of the little guys once and for all.
Final score: TCU 33, Florida 7

#13 Boise State v. #5 Texas
Three undefeateds had already moved on, and an undefeated team was going to be the national champion. But the loser of this game wasn’t going to lose their undefeated status easily.

On the second play from scrimmage, Tre Newton broke open a 56-yard run to the Bronco 14, but the Longhorns could do nothing with it and settled for a field goal. They were better the next drive after returning a punt to their own  44, resulting in Newton pounding the rock for a 14-yard touchdown run. Boise struck back when Kellen Moore connected with Kirby Moore for 32 yards, setting up a field goal of their own, but a long pass from Colt McCoy to Malcolm Williams that was only brought down on the 4 set up another touchdown, giving Texas a 17-3 lead. But anyone thinking the Broncos would take this lying down were in for a rude awakening when Doug Masrtin broke off a 64-yard touchdown run of his own. That was just the first quarter; anyone expecting an offensive shootout seemed vindicated when McCoy connected with Vondrell McGee for 34 yards early in the second, allowing McCoy to go the remaining 9 yards himself, only to see Boise start the next drive on the 39, and Kellen Moore connect with Kyle Efaw for another big gain, setting up another field goal. No worries: McCoy connects with Jordan Shipley for 35 yards en route to a field goal of their own. Texas leads 27-13 and there’s still five minutes left in the first half.

But neither team scores before halftime, and the game becomes downright defensive in the third quarter. Neither team collects a first down until McCoy connects with James Kirkendoll over four minutes in; a later 25-yard pass to Shipley helps set up a field goal, the only score of the quarter for either side. After another Boise three-and-out, McCoy leads Texas on another long drive that puts the Longhorns on the Bronco 9 to end the quarter, seemingly about to put an already 17-point game away for good. But something about the quarter break awakens the Broncos, and on the first play of the new quarter, McCoy gets picked off and Kyle Wilson makes it all the way to his own 22 before being tackled. Jeremy Avery proceeds to break off a 40-yard touchdown run. McCoy is intercepted again, and Avery breaks off another 40-yard touchdown run. Boise State 27: Texas 30.

Thus begins the most crucial drive of the game, with McCoy needing to bleed as much of the 11 minutes left on the clock as he can without losing the football. McGee gets stuffed on first down, so McCoy connects with Shipley for gains of ten and nine yards. Newton picks up the first down, then McCoy returns to the air, connecting with Cody Johnson for seven yards, then McCoy is forced out of the pocket and collects a yard himself. Johnson picks up the first down, then McGee collects another four yards and McCoy connects with Dan Buckner for ten and Shipley for twelve. Two plays later, McGee finishes off the remaining ten yards, putting the lead back at ten with 5:26 left. The Broncos can’t let Texas get the ball again.

The drive doesn’t start off well, but Titus Young has an 18-yard catch on fourth down that keeps it alive, followed by another 12-yard catch by Austin Pettis on second. But on the next second down, Kellen Moore is picked off. A few first downs later, and Texas escapes Austin with a game that, depending on your point of view, was closer than the final score indicated or not as close as the final score. Shipley had 147 yards on 10 catches, but Avery had two big touchdown runs – both were stars on this night, even as the quarterbacks shined brightly.
Final score: Boise State 27, Texas 37 (This is why I’m not quite agreeing with the simulation’s pick of Avery as the player of the game, because when it comes to mishandling knees, this one takes the cake. So McCoy takes a first-down snap with 2:01 left and gets four on a pass to Kirkendoll, no doubt taking several seconds off the clock. I can buy that. Then on second down, McCoy takes a knee… with 90, not 80, seconds left. Then, even though his idiocy means he can no longer run out the clock, he takes another knee on third down, leaving Texas to kick a field goal. Then Avery manages to break off a 50-yard run to set up a touchdown in the remaining time. Thankfully Texas recovers the ensuing onside kick to end this madness, but this is the closest WhatIfSports has gotten to giving me a Miracle in the Meadowlands situation, and one of these days it’s going to give me one for real. I mean, c’mon man! I don’t know how hard it is to program the simulator to handle knees right, but surely it can’t be that hard to make it figure out that under no circumstances should a knee be taken on second down with more than 80 seconds left on the clock!)

Semifinal matchups:

Rose Bowl: #5 Texas v. #1 Alabama
Procrastination saves the day! Off to the Capitol One and Holiday bowls with Ohio State and Oregon, because I still won’t be simulating this even though the real game is a week later. Two top defenses (even though Boise State cracked it) and two Heisman contenders.

Sugar Bowl: #6 TCU v. #2 Cincinnati
The game everyone would rather have happened for real rather than Florida-Cincinnati or TCU-Boise State. Two top-notch offenses square off, but TCU has the defense to back it up, a defense that held the mighty Tim Tebow to seven points. This could be an epic Golden Bowl from a posting perspective, because it’ll be the two biggest real-life claimants to a national title left (assuming Boise doesn’t score a real-life upset).

Non-semifinal BCS bowls:
Cotton Bowl: Iowa v. Boise State
Orange Bowl: Miami (FL) v. Florida

#16 Troy v. #1 Alabama
Last year, Troy gave Oklahoma a scare despite never leading that prophesied the Sooners’ upset at the hands of USC. This year, Troy finally led… once. They got the ball to start the game and drove down the field for a field goal. Then after three runs by Mark Ingram, Trent Richardson ran off a 47-yard touchdown run. Alabama would score on their next drive as well, and though they went three-and-out on their next drive, they’d score a touchdown on all but the last drive of the second quarter, including a 62-yard punt return (though with a slight breeze and light rain, Leigh Tiffin missed three out of four extra points in the quarter), entering the half up 39-6 and on its way to a win that was more of an early-season guarantee game than a tournament game, proving the importance of seeding. Dueling “Bring on the Canes!” and “Bring on the Ducks!” chants echo across the field for most of the second half. Ingram made his last pitch for the Heisman with nearly ten yards a carry, four runs of over 20 yards, and a touchdown.
Final score: Troy 13, Alabama 62

#15 East Carolina v. #2 Cincinnati
East Carolina, especially their defense, played tougher than the final score indicated last year against Texas. This time the offenses came out to play, as Brian Kelly’s departure seemed to be a minor distraction for the Bearcats. Tony Pike went three for four on the Bearcats’ first drive of the game en route to a touchdown, the teams traded field goals, then East Carolina went three-and-out and Pike drove the Bearcats 66 yards for another touchdown. A 35-yard run by Brandon Jackson and 26-yard pass to Darryl Freeney sets up the Pirates for a touchdown of their own, but while the Bearcats are forced to punt on their next drive, Marcus Waugh picks off Patrick Pinkney to set up a 60-yard Isaiah Pead touchdown run the next play. East Carolina picks up another touchdown to enter the half down only 7, but most of the analysts think Cincinnati is just on the verge of putting this game away.

Sure enough, the first drive of the second half ends in a Bearcat touchdown, and answers a Pirate field goal with a 41-yard Pead run for another touchdown. The two teams trade touchdowns to start the fourth quarter, leaving Cincinnati up 45-27 with 9:30 to play. East Carolina unsuccessfully goes for it on fourth and 18 on the Cincinnati 36, but then forces Cincinnati to go three-and-out and blocks the ensuing punt, allowing them to cut the lead to 11 (they elect not to go for two). They kick the ball away with 3:28 left rather than go for an onside kick, but the defense forces another three-and-out. The Pirates can’t pick up the first down, though, and another lengthy Pead touchdown run ices the game. Still, did the Pirates provide a blueprint for other teams to potentially crack the Bearcat defense?
Final score: East Carolina 34, Cincinnati 52

#10 LSU v. #7 Iowa
Unlike Pete Carroll last year, Les Miles doesn’t complain too strongly about the sub-freezing temperatures, knowing his team was lucky just to get into the field. Iowa drew first blood about midway through the first quarter with a field goal, then on the first play of the next drive Adam Robinson got a 38-yard gain into Tigers territory, followed later by a 23-yard gain on a screen pass to Tony Moeaki that falls just short of the end zone. Iowa punches it in to end the quarter up 10-0, and goes on another field goal drive to open the second. A freak play happens on the second play from scrimmage on LSU’s ensuing drive as Keiland Williams breaks free for a 63-yard run all the way to the 8 only to have the ball knocked free before he can make the end zone, giving the ball back to the Hawkeyes on their own 8, but while they proceed to drive close enough for a 45-yard field goal attempt, it sails wide left and LSU burns the clock for most of the rest of the half with a drive that ends with LSU finally getting on the board with a field goal, entering the half down 13-3.

LSU’s first drive of the second half also ends in a field goal to cut the deficit to 7, but another big Moeaki screen on the ensuing drive helps set up another Iowa touchdown to make it a two-score game again, and Iowa widens the lead further when Robinson breaks out for a 55-yard touchdown run off a draw. Thanks in part to a 46-yard run off a screen by Richard Dickson off the first play from scrimmage, LSU cuts the deficit back to 14 on the ensuing drive, but Les Miles elects not to onside kick with 10 minutes left. Iowa drives into LSU territory again but Chris Hawkins picks off Ricky Stanzi, giving LSU the ball back with 5:52 left, but they can only muster one first down and Iowa tacks on a field goal to put it away. Robinson is the star of the game with over 200 yards rushing, including the two big runs and three touchdowns, and the Big Ten finally has concrete evidence that those southern teams can’t come up north.
Final score: LSU 13, Iowa 30

Late afternoon games:

#14 Central Michigan v. #3 Florida
Tim Tebow is picked off on Florida’s first drive, hurting his Heisman candidacy. But he didn’t win the Heisman he already has for his throwing. It’s a combination of his legs and his arm that drive the Gators down 91 yards on the next drive for a touchdown. But the Gators don’t score and only pick up one first down the rest of the half, while the Chippewas penetrate Gator territory on their first full drive of the second quarter, punt, and return the Gators’ punt to the Florida 34. Andrew Aguila misses a 39-yard attempt, though, and Central Michigan can’t score at all in the first half. A long Mike Gillislee run sets up another Florida touchdown, but Central Michigan in the third quarter provides the biggest scare the Gators have had in the entire Golden Bowl tournament. Aguila misses from 45 but Florida goes three-and-out and Aguila redeems himself with a successful try from 49 yards out, the first score the Gators have allowed in the second half of a tournament game since WhatIfSports has been used to simulate the Golden Bowl Tournament, and when Emmanuel Moody loses the ball on the Gators’ second play from scrimmage and the Chippewas return it for a touchdown, the Gators are up only four, their tightest second-half lead in tournament history.

After the teams exchange three-and-outs, Tebow enters the fourth needing to put the game away or risk seeing his Heisman candidacy completely vanish. But Florida crosses the quarter break with another three-and-out, the ensuing punt gives the Chippewas good field position, and they finally pick up a first down. That’s it, though: they go three-and-out from there, punt, and watch as Tebow runs for 49 yards on a 90-yard drive ending with a 19-yard Jeffery Demps run for a touchdown. Dan LeFevour gains 8 on second down on the ensuing drive and a Florida encroachment penalty gives the Chippewas the first down, but LeFevour is sacked on second, sees Kito Poblah brought down just short of the marker on third, and on fourth-and-1 completes it to Bryan Anderson, who picks up the first down only to lose the ball with 3:11 left. Tebow takes care of the remaining clock and finishes with one of his biggest running efforts in the Golden Bowl tournament, gaining 84 yards on 25 attempts, and isn’t too shabby passing either, but Demps is the player of the game with over five yards a carry (75 yards on 14 attempts) and scoring all the Gators’ touchdowns. LeFevour isn’t shabby, going 10-for-16 passing, but it isn’t quite enough on this day.
Final score: Central Michigan 10, Florida 21 (since Florida has first-and-goal with 1:52 left and Central Michigan burns their last timeout after the play that gave them the first, I’m ignoring the madness of the last 38 seconds)

#13 Boise State v. #4 Georgia Tech
Vindication for those who felt Georgia Tech didn’t deserve to be seeded over Texas. And finally, Golden Bowl Tournament verification for the non-BCS schools. It wasn’t even close: Boise State scored touchdowns on every drive of the first half, going into halftime up 35-13. They’re finally held to a three-and-out on their first drive of the second half, and Jonathan Dwyer gets a 53-yard run that sets up a Jacket touchdown to cut the deficit to 15. With an astonishing 246 yards on 22 carries and a touchdown, Dwyer would be the player of the game if the defense could get a stop. Instead D.J. Harper’s only reception of the game is a 44-yard touchdown, Dwyer is stripped on the first play from scrimmage on the ensuing drive, leading to another touchdown, and Boise State is up 49-20 after three quarters, with the Broncos icing the game two minutes into the fourth with a 72-yard Doug Martin touchdown run. Only four Bronco drives the entire game don’t end in touchdowns, and one of them ends in victory formation. Kellen Moore is the star, going 17-for-21 passing with four touchdowns, and Martin pitches in with, in addition to his game-icer, 66 yards on 11 carries and another touchdown.
Final score: Boise State 56, Georgia Tech 27 (ignoring the completely unnecessary field goal at the end – seriously, Moore takes a knee with 16 seconds left and the Broncos still trot out the field goal unit?)

#11 Virginia Tech v. #6 TCU
The non-BCS schools didn’t need Boise State to bring them vindication, though it was nice. TCU never trailed, driving 79 yards for a touchdown on the first drive of the game, but Virginia Tech kept it close for a half, evening the score on the next drive when Ryan Williams takes the ball on a draw and goes 63 yards for the touchdown. TCU gets a chip shot field goal, but after the teams trade three-and-outs Beamer Ball comes into play as the TCU punt is returned into Horned Frogs territory, allowing the Hokies to start the second with a field goal to re-tie the game. But the Hokies wouldn’t score again, TCU picked up a touchdown before the half, and put the game away in the third quarter with three more touchdowns, the first on a 51-yard run by Edward Wesley. The star, though, is Matthew Tucker, who gets 136 yards on 16 carries with three touchdowns.
Final score: Virginia Tech 10, TCU 48

Primetime games:

#12 Ohio State v. #5 Texas
I simulated two alternatives for this game to reflect the fact WhatIfSports doesn’t have a “fog” option, with no middle ground between “clear skies” and “occasional light rain“. (I think I had a similar situation last year, but don’t remember what I did. In retrospect, maybe I should have simulated a light wind.) Fundamentally, they’re pretty much the same: Texas scores a field goal if anything in the first quarter. In the “clear” game, they break it open in the second quarter, starting it with another field goal and getting an 81-yard punt return for a touchdown on the ensuing drive; Tre Newton finally puts an offensive touchdown on the board before the half, and while the second play from scrimmage in the second half is a 31-yard interception return for a touchdown by Todd Denlinger, it’s Ohio State’s only score of the game. Colt McCoy drives to third-and-goal from the 1 but can’t punch it in either time on the ensuing drive, but after a Buckeye three-and-out Texas gets the ball back on the 7 and finish the job. Terrell Pryor can’t complete a pass all game, going 0-12 with an interception, and nets no yardage on the ground.

The “rainy” game is more interesting, as Texas picks up a touchdown early in the second quarter, but Ohio State kicks three field goals to take the lead into the half. Texas still puts away the game in the second half, though, getting into the end zone on their second drive of the half, then seeing Brandon Saine cough up the ball on Ohio State’s second play from scrimmage to set up a 52-yard Newton touchdown run. Blake Gideon picks off Terrell Pryor shortly into the fourth quarter for another touchdown, and the Longhorns put the game away with two field goals to go up 34-9 with 3:13 to play. In both games, neither QB is impressive with each throwing a pick (in the clear game, McCoy is 25-for-34 for 275 yards but never puts the ball in the end zone; in the rainy game, McCoy’s 15-for-23 for 146 yards and a TD slightly outplays Pryor’s 8-for-18 for 114 yards with 15 yards on as many carries on the ground, but it isn’t Heisman-caliber) and Newton is the player of the game with 76 (clear game) or 115 (rainy game) yards rushing on 16 carries with at least two touchdowns: three running in the clear game, one running and one receiving in the rainy game.
Final score: Ohio State 7 or 9, Texas 37 or 34 (I’m ignoring the last field goal in the clear game – WhatIfSports was really bad with this, wasn’t it?)

#9 Oregon v. #8 Miami (FL)
Things start out well for Oregon. They force a three-and-out on the game’s first drive and, in breezy conditions, get the ball back on the Hurricane 14, drawing first blood with a quick touchdown. But later, Jacory Harris gets three big plays to start a drive en route to a touchdown of Miami’s own, evening the score after one, and another big play helps set up another touchdown midway through the second. LaMichael James re-evens the score with a 71-yard touchdown run off a draw with about two and a half remaining before the half, but the ensuing kickoff is returned almost to midfield, helping set up another Miami touchdown that gives Miami the lead at the half.

Oregon drives 67 yards for a 28-yard field goal to start the second half, cutting the deficit to four, but Miami gets good field position off the kickoff again and Damien Berry breaks open a 32-yard touchdown run. James picks up another big touchdown run, this time 66 yards, but Miami’s own James, Javarris, responds with a 39-yard touchdown run of his own and Miami leads 35-24 after three. Oregon’s most concerted comeback attempt begins with about six minutes left on the clock, but it stalls in the red zone, giving Miami the ball back with 2:35 left, and Berry proceeds to ice the game with an 82-yard touchdown run. The questions surrounding the decision not to give Oregon home field advantage will still be asked after this one, where the Hurricanes seemed to vindicate the respect the committee continues to give the ACC. Despite the loss, LaMichael James is the player of the game with three runs of over 20 yards en route to a 217-yard day off 20 carries and two touchdowns.
Final score: Oregon 24, Miami (FL) 42

Quarterfinal matchups:

#8 Miami (FL) v. #1 Alabama
Miami tamed Oregon’s high-powered offense by racking up even more points. Now they have to crack the Bama defense and figure out how to stop still-likely Heisman winner Mark Ingram.

#7 Iowa v. #2 Cincinnati
Brian Kelly is gone (even though it won’t show in the simulation) and Tony Pike is going up against a good pass defense. Upset alert?

#6 TCU v. #3 Florida
Face it, these last two games are the ones everyone wants to see. How about this for Tim Tebow’s last game in the Swamp? He has to face a team that’s run the table to this point, one whose defense can match Florida’s on the stat sheet. And Florida hasn’t faced an offense that’s racked up as many stats as TCU. But Florida’s rushing attack is still potent, and they still have Tebow.

#13 Boise State v. #5 Texas
It’s an offense that scored more points than anyone against one of the top defenses in the country. And Colt McCoy. One team will leave still undefeated; the other is likely opening the new year in Cowboys Stadium.

Bowl schedule, modified and unmodified, hopefully coming tomorrow (although since Ohio State and Oregon both lost I’m conflicted about the Rose Bowl); quarterfinals to be posted December 27.

• 11 teams are selected from the Conference Champions of all conferences
• 5 more teams are selected from an at-large pool consisting of all other teams
• First and second round games on campus sites; semifinals at any two of the Sugar Bowl, Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, Cotton Bowl, and Capital One Bowl, determined by regional interest (in actuality, it would rotate between the Sugar, Rose, Orange, and either Cotton or Cap One); the National Championship to be held at the Rose Bowl

The conference champions with auto bids are Alabama, Texas, Cincinnati, TCU, Boise State, Ohio State, Georgia Tech, Oregon, East Carolina, Central Michigan, and Troy. Virginia Tech, Miami (FL), Iowa, Florida, and LSU have been selected as at-large teams.

Good luck to all our teams, especially our Number 1 seed, Alabama.

Octofinal matchups (technically played last weekend):

#16 Troy (Sun Belt champion) v. #1 Alabama (SEC champion)
Alabama gets the top seed (and it wasn’t even close) despite an atrocious out-of-conference schedule outside the V-Tech game. Troy has become the Sun Belt’s dominant team, going undefeated in conference, but while they won’t have to leave the state, they do get a second straight 16 seed and will have to try and find a way to get past a defense that was tops in the nation in points allowed and to stop this year’s real-life Heisman winner. (Not in the Golden Bowl-verse, since the Heisman ceremony obviously couldn’t be the same weekend many of the contenders would be playing.)

#15 East Carolina (C-USA champion) v. #2 Cincinnati (Big East champion)
Read on to find out why East Carolina doesn’t get a rematch of last year’s game against Texas. Instead they must find a way to stop Cincinnati’s high-powered offense. This game is played days after Brian Kelly is announced as the next head coach of Notre Dame; with such a theoretically easy first-round opponent, does he bail on the team just days before the game? It’s probably impossible to simulate.

#14 Central Michigan (MAC champion) v. #3 Florida (at-large)
Despite losing the SEC Championship Game Florida still gets a cupcake in the form of a team that went unbeaten in conference, same as Alabama. But they also get star quarterback Dan LeFevour, who has done much to turn Central Michigan into a perennial MAC power. But he hasn’t faced a defense as all-around strong as Florida, or had to outplay Tim Tebow.

#13 Boise State (WAC champion) v. #4 Georgia Tech (ACC champion)
Every year, the ACC gets a number of high-RPI teams, teams you wouldn’t normally think of as being that good. Two years ago Virginia Tech was the #1 seed, last year Georgia Tech got the last at-large (and outseeded the conference champion), and this year the ACC gets two at-larges and G-Tech outseeds Texas, if barely. Boise State shouldn’t be too upset at getting the unlucky number 13 seed that denotes “worst good team”, meaning there’s no chance of a game on the blue turf, because I placed them where they are mostly so as to avoid an all-unbeaten first round matchup, postponing a Texas showdown to the quarterfinals. G-Tech’s triple option had the second-best running attack in the country, but Boise State was tops in the nation in overall points per game, so expect a very exciting, high-scoring contest.

#12 Ohio State (Big Ten champion) v. #5 Texas (Big 12 champion)
The Big 12 had a down year, with its second-highest RPI team being Oklahoma State, and Texas’ strength of schedule was hurt accordingly. Ohio State is forced into the bottom two “good team” seeds by Oregon falling to the 8-9 game, seeded below Iowa, helped by bad losses (USC was #37 in the RPI), a questionable out-of-conference schedule, and a nonexistent road resume outside Penn State. The result: a replay of last year’s real-life Fiesta Bowl, and of a regular season series in the two prior years, against the #4 team in the nation in scoring. It’s also a showdown of two quarterback studs in Colt McCoy and Terrell Pryor, where the key will be which one can get past the other team’s top-five defense.

#11 Virginia Tech (at-large) v. #6 TCU (Mountain West champion)
Honestly, the seeding process for seeds 6-13 was such a disaster I’m ignoring this year’s results for comparison purposes in future years. My brain was burned out from constantly chasing school deadlines all quarter and a lot of the time I could barely concentrate while doing the work, and I think my comparison criteria changed as I went along because LSU was the last at-large in the field but definitely isn’t the lowest-seeded at-large. A lot of the seeding from 4-13 was done to fit my bracketing criteria, namely, postponing conference rematches as late as possible (for example, LSU can’t be the 11) and Big Ten-Pac-10 champions meet in the Rose Bowl, more than anything else. It doesn’t help that this year is one of the biggest arguments against my system I’ve yet seen; without major upsets, Florida is the only real deserving at-large (and based on the BCS standings, the only change in the at-larges would be Miami (FL) beating Penn State for the last spot – yet I still didn’t find the resumes of Oregon, Ohio State, and Boise State strong enough for first-round home games) and they greatly reduced the importance of the SEC championship game by still getting a top-3 seed. Anyway, TCU is a rare non-BCS school that got where they are with defense, allowing fewer yards than anyone (and the second-fewest rushing yards), yet still managed to rack up stats on offense. V-Tech’s best hope: their own passing defense, and Beamer Ball.

#10 LSU (at-large) v. #7 Iowa (at-large)
Iowa will have home field advantage and a top-notch pass defense. If Les Miles’ squad can knock them off, it’ll be a major chip on the shoulder of SEC backers.

#9 Oregon (Pac-10 champion) v. #8 Miami (FL) (at-large)
Some Oregon and Pac-10 backers might bitterly suggest I took the advice of fictional Pete Carroll (who might have continued the streak in the Golden Bowl-verse) and placed the game in the warm-weather climate at the expense of a potentially once-in-a-decade chance at a tournament game in Autzen Stadium (the Dolphins played in Jacksonville last weekend, so Dolphin Land Shark Stadium was free). Maybe, or maybe the Hurricanes didn’t lose to Stanford (RPI #50), beat G-Tech even if at home, and beat more than one team in the RPI top 50 on the road. The Ducks’ high-powered offense, led by Jeremiah Masoli and potentially further helped by LeGarrette Blount, will still be a handful for the Hurricanes to stop.

The half of the bracket containing the 1 seed will play in the Rose Bowl for the semifinal; the half of the bracket containing the 2 seed will play in the Sugar Bowl, meaning if seeds hold (except for Texas knocking off Georgia Tech), both semifinals won’t need to be simulated because they’ll reflect real bowls at the same sites. First-round results from Whatifsports.com coming later today.

Bowl commissioners do not want to lose their cash cow. There were 34 bowls in 2008-09 and they all raked in a lot of money. Bowl commissioners do not want their party to end and be replaced by a playoff, and they have the power and money that says it’s not going to end. They want a piece of the playoff pie. But that’s not the only thing they want. They don’t want to be reduced to “play-in games”, and they want their history and tradition to continue to the greatest extent possible. (And the BCS has already removed the idea of the bowls leading up to New Year’s Day and the correlation between the bowls and the holiday season.)

The Rose Bowl has been continuously played almost every year since the Wilson Administration – that is, around the end of World War I. The Rose Bowl has more history behind it than any championship in American sports except the World Series and the Stanley Cup (not the Stanley Cup Final as it exists today). (And the only other championships around the world that could possibly be older are the Olympics and some soccer championships.) For decades, especially between when the Arizona schools joined the Pac-10 and when Penn State joined the Big 10, it served as a national championship game of its own between the champions of the Pac-10 and the Big 10. Those two conferences could be considered to form a single east-west super-conference with a single, controversy-free championship game. Those days are over, ended when the Rose Bowl agreed to take part in the BCS. But the idea is still powerful, and you do not end something with more than a century of tradition with a snap of the fingers. The city of Pasadena places too much value on the Tournament of Roses ending in the game between two of the best college football teams in the country, and the game still gets better ratings than any college football game outside the BCS Championship Game. Four of the BCS conferences and all the other bowls could be completely in favor of a playoff proposal, but if the Rose Bowl, Pac-10, and Big Ten don’t like it, it’s not going to happen.

And there is, in all likelihood, not a playoff possible that would both satisfy the Rose Bowl and maintain its own integrity. The Rose Bowl will not put up with being either reduced to a play-in game to another bowl or forced to abandon its Pac-10/Big Ten matchup all the time. (Witness how the Rose Bowl pissed off everyone, including its own fans, by sacrificing Illinois at the altar of USC after the 2007 season instead of a Missouri team one win away from the national championship game.) The Rose Bowl was forced to become a national championship game moved off New Year’s Day in 2002 and 2006 before the creation of the separate National Championship Game removed that obligation and returned the Rose to New Years’ every year. Making the Rose the National Championship Game would be better than putting it in an earlier round, but it would abandon the Pac-10/Big Ten combination, possibly every year. (The more often you make it the national championship, the more you piss off the Rose by moving it off New Years/removing the Pac-10/Big Ten matchup and the more you piss off the other bowls for not being the national championship.) Not making it the National Championship Game and moving it outside the playoff entirely would still risk teams being selected for the National Championship Game from either the Pac-10 or Big Ten and ruining things, though that’s no different than now. Making it part of the playoff and maintaining the Pac-10/Big Ten matchup whenever possible would not only piss the Rose Bowl off at being made into a quarterfinal (as in one popular “incorporate the BCS bowls” idea), but effectively violate the sanctity of the playoff as well by manipulating the bracket to satisfy one group – the worst of both worlds.

What the Rose Bowl would really want would be a return to the era of no real championship, but just as college football signed its deal with the devil by creating the BCS, so the Rose Bowl signed its own death sentence by joining it. My generation has no particular sentimental connection to the idea of the Rose Bowl as a Pac-10/Big Ten showdown, seeing the Rose Bowl’s “tradition” only as a roadblock to the playoff we all want, and eventually we’ll come into power and the Rose Bowl’s tradition will lose much of its power, but it will take many years. (I live less than a mile from a Pac-10 school and even I don’t have any sentimental attachment to the Rose Bowl; PTI co-host and Washington Post sportswriter Michael Wilbon, who’s old enough to be my father, went to an admittedly-bad-at-football Big Ten school and even he doesn’t have enough attachment to the Rose Bowl not to want a playoff!) But while the Rose Bowl’s opposition is the most formidable, there are 33 other bowls that don’t want to lose their power, and while many of them are cheap cash-ins between two mediocre teams, others have their own history, tradition, big names, and money behind them – namely, the other three BCS bowls, as well as the Cotton and the bowl now known as the Capitol One, and to a lesser extent, the Outback, Chick-fil-A, Holiday, Gator, Alamo, and Sun Bowls. You could make a case for the Champs Sports and Liberty bowls as well, but even the Texas Bowl deserves to know they won’t be left behind in a playoff.

A lot of narrowminded playoff proponents say “Just incorporate the bowls into the playoff!” but that would remove a lot of the bowls’ significance as a reward and vacation for a job well done at the end of the season, as opposed to a stepping stone to something bigger. Bowls that are quarterfinals or worse aren’t really bowls anymore. It might not be best for the playoff either: having teams fight for home field advantage would heighten the importance of seeding, and populate the stands at each playoff game with passionate supporters of the home team, showcase college football’s great stadiums and pageantry, and pump money into the host schools, as opposed to packing the stands of a dreary, cookie-cutter, possibly NFL venue with disinterested tourists and locals and pump (not as much, given the added travel) money to sponsors and bowl committees. Yes, March Madness is hosted entirely on neutral sites, but there’s a reason the NFL playoffs (outside the Super Bowl) aren’t, and there’s a reason the women’s basketball tournament has a lot of not-so-neutral sites despite the effect that has on fairness of competition. Having teams hop from bowl to bowl for weeks would put a lot of strain on fans – even awarding home field advantage is too much of a logistical concern for some playoff opponents, we don’t need to make that any more of an issue than it already is.

More realistic playoff proposals recognize two things: one, there are at most 16 teams getting plucked for the playoff to 68 teams that play in bowls (24 teams would be a closer match to the ratio of teams selected in college basketball but would include more questionable teams and dilute the regular season too much for my tastes), and two, the bowls have been pretty diluted already by the creation of One Bowl to Rule them All (which is one reason there are so many pointless bowls now). These people keep bowls for all the teams not in the playoff, comparable to the NIT in college basketball, and possibly for teams that lose in the playoff. A plus-one with semifinal games played the week after the conference championships could completely preserve the bowl lineup with the sole exception of a more acceptable championship game. Larger playoffs have more issues with this sort of thing. My 16-team playoff, as it has been devised in the past, has first-round games the week after the conference championships, quarterfinals at Christmas, semifinals New Year’s Day, and a final played anywhere from a week after New Year’s to possibly on ML King day (taking care to avoid NFL Playoff interference). Tightening it up further runs into problems like finals week, which university presidents would never accept messing with, but under this system only losers in the first round can be thrown back into the general bowl pool. In the past I’ve assigned two BCS bowls to the semifinals, one BCS bowl and the Cotton Bowl to quarterfinal losers, and the Fiesta Bowl as a third-place game between the semifinal losers, maintaining the notion of the bowls allowing one-fourth of all teams to end their seasons with a win and better evening out the number of games each team plays, but possibly making too many teams play too many games too far into December and January. This year the first round would be the weekend of December 12; December 19 would be taken off for finals; December 26 or thereabouts would be the quarterfinals; New Year’s would host the semis; and the final probably couldn’t be held any earlier than January 7. It goes no later than the current BCS Championship Game (in the best of circumstances), but not a single additional round could be added without adding more games towards the end of this period, or otherwise pushing the whole regular season back or compressing it. (Ideally one week would be removed from the end of the regular season, but that means the conference championships are either gone or held Thanksgiving Weekend, which is currently populated with rivalry games, and I don’t want to bolt the conference championships without cutting down conference sizes, which would mean more conferences and more auto bids. Until this year the Ohio State-Michigan game was held the week before Thanksgiving, though, so that might not be so much of a problem.)

Since we’re talking about finals…

You have to protect the integrity of academics! College football (and basketball) sold out on academics a long time ago. The same schools, conferences, and NCAA that don’t want to add a playoff because it would negatively impact academics added a twelfth game solely so they could make more money. (The first thing I’d do to make more space for my 16-team playoff, if I needed it and if it would help, would be to junk the twelfth game.) They could have created a plus-one instead, adding the same number of games to only two to four teams’ schedules, and not impacting the other teams’ academics or bodies. FCS, Division II, and Division III have playoffs, and some last longer than the conference championships in FBS. (You can make a case that academics for the more heavily-worked players at schools where football matters much more need to be protected more. But you can also make a case that, because smaller schools care more about academics, they should have academics interfered with and the more athletics-centered schools shouldn’t.) March Madness extends into April, which at schools where the semester ends at the winter break, technically crosses the spring break into the next semester. (And at two-semester schools, every winter sport spans two semesters! In fact, college basketball games are played as early as November and December, in the fall!)

(A quick digression. Arguments about how FCS or Division II or Division III have playoffs can be used only to prove it’s logistically, academically, and athletically possible. Even then those playoffs often begin much earlier than an FBS playoff would have to; I think at least one has its championship game during FBS’s conference championship weekend. It’s not a good idea to use it as an argument that “we can install a college football playoff and change tradition” because that is the tradition for the lower divisions where the football playoff dates back to the 70s or earlier.)

Won’t someone please think of the children! The “overworked injury-prone athletes” argument is even more asinine than the academics argument, and Gunther doesn’t even bring it up, perhaps because it’s lost some steam since the original “Case for a Playoff”. This time the counterargument is not smaller football divisions, though by the same token as the academics argument they do back up the notion of a playoff here (why should the tougher FBS athletes play fewer games?), but other levels played by the same players. We don’t even need to talk about the NFL’s 16-game regular season, where you can play 20 games if your team is good enough to make the playoffs, plus one to four preseason games, which many players at FBS schools are using college as a stepping-stone to. You can at least make the case that kids’ bodies are more fragile. But if you make that case, what do you say about high school football players who often play more games than they will at the college level, while having academics impacted?

The fans can’t possibly attend all these games! They don’t seem to have any problem with attending the games at the NCAA basketball tournament, but if you’re too concerned about that, have the first few rounds on campus sites, as suggested above.

The controversy the current system creates is one reason why college football is second in popularity right now only to the NFL. I’m surprised Gunther doesn’t include this argument, because it relates directly to what he sees as the core of the issue for playoff opponents. It isn’t just an argument against a playoff, it’s an argument for the subjective system Gunther’s opponents advocate. However, he does populate the margins of the argument when he talks about money. More on that in a minute.

Certainly the present controversy attracts a certain breed of fan in a way that other sports don’t. A lot of my activity regarding college football, especially my rankings and simulated playoff, I don’t think I’d do if college football had a real playoff. So this really comes down to why you think college football is so popular. Is it because it creates bar arguments? Or is it because of the history and traditions? Or is it because of the taste of a real championship the BCS provides? If it’s any but the first, this argument is completely asinine. Gunther includes an argument provided by playoff proponents that, while riddled with holes when talking about money, is hard to counteract when talking about popularity.

If the college basketball regular season makes $$$, and the playoff makes $$$$$$$$$$,
then if the college football regular season makes $$$$$$$, a playoff would make $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

In other words, if college football gets X number of fans with no championship, and X+Y number of fans with the BCS, then it stands to reason that with a real championship created by a playoff, with more games to focus the hype towards the championship game, it will get X+Y+Z number of fans. The BCS may turn on nerds like me, but drunken, dumb fans of the NFL (especially if they never went to a BCS college) probably find it too confusing and cerebral “thinky”. (I don’t mean that to disparage the NFL or its fans.) College football may be second in popularity right now to the NFL, but a playoff gives it a shot to rectify that problem. Think that’s too far-fetched? Until the AFL-NFL split and merger, college football was more popular than the NFL. Today, college basketball is more popular than the NBA. The ratings prove it: the national championship game, which is almost always a snoozer and anticlimax (one way you could tell 2008 was a great year for sports was that even the college basketball national championship was great and thrilling instead of a blowout), consistently gets more viewers than the NBA Finals. The Final Four gets better ratings than any NBA games except the Finals (and haven’t bolted for cable either). Even the biggest games in college basketball’s “meaningless” regular season get better ratings than any non-Christmas NBA regular season games.

Granted, some people think the NBA is too populated with prima donnas and that the college game is more “pure”, but I suspect those same people have a chance to arise as college football fans if the NFL keeps getting populated with Terrell Owens-es and if it attracts more attention for steroid use. The Golden Bowl, as I call the final of my 16-team playoff, could be a bigger event than the Super Bowl if it replaced a confusing system that doubtless turns countless fans off the sport. Texas-USC popped a rating on par with the NFL’s conference championships. The ratings might have been even higher if there was a real playoff leading up to it. The more people accept a game as a legitimate championship, the more popular it is – what a concept!

Which brings me to the number one obstacle to a playoff, perhaps even including within itself the bowls’ obstruction…

College football loses money. That’s probably a bad way to phrase it. There are a lot of different interests that both sides admit would make more or less money in one system or the other. Gunther says that when either side brings up money, it’s not their main concern; it’s just an elephant in the living room that they can’t ignore. He says this because one, most of the active debaters don’t make any money off college football (even if they bet on it that’ll only affect them by increasing the number of games to bet on), and two, both sides argue against making more money as often as not, whether it’s proponents blasting the bowls and their money as an obstacle to a playoff or opponents saying extra money from a playoff isn’t worth the loss of traditions and regular season importance.

I used to hear the argument that college football would lose money with a playoff a significant amount, though even then it was mutated into another form I’ll get to in a bit. The battle lines are drawn a bit differently now. More and more, the focus has shifted to playoff proponents claiming a playoff would make more money than the BCS does. This is based more on logic (if a bit of a logical fallacy) than on any robust economic studies that, as far as me and Gunther know, don’t exist. It seems simple enough: A playoff would mean there would be more games played. More games = more money. More concretely, the NCAA gets paid billions of dollars for the NCAA Tournament, over half a billion a year. The BCS just signed a four-year deal with ESPN worth barely $100 million a year, a total amount of money that doesn’t match what the NCAA gets for the basketball tournament in a single year, despite the fact college football is more popular. A playoff would not only be more legitimate, it would create 15 games worth paying for (under a 16-team system) instead of just 5 in the BCS. How is this even a discussion?

The flaw in this reasoning becomes apparent when you notice that the SEC raked in over a billion dollars from ESPN at the same time the BCS signed up with the Worldwide Leader. Why is a single conference raking in over a billion dollars in bank (more, I should note, than the BCS)? No doubt it’s because of the SEC’s regular season football games. You better have already proved that a playoff won’t appreciably devalue the regular season if you’re going to make the argument that college football will make more money with a playoff because college basketball does. More to the point, the gatekeepers of college football make more money, from all sources, from the current system than they do from March Madness. Gunther has compiled the relevant numbers here and they show that the Big Six conferences make way more money off the BCS alone than they do off March Madness – from 2002-2006, all six of them together made, on average, $109 million from the BCS to $70 million to March Madness. Any half-decent playoff would involve splitting that money up with the non-BCS conferences, and possibly the NCAA, as is the case in March Madness. (And I have a feeling that if the NCAA were to run an FBS playoff they would attempt to re-merge the subdivisions of Division I and jack the size up to 32 teams.)

But wait a minute. There are significantly fewer teams in FBS than there are in Division I as a whole. In fact, while the mid-major teams are the majority in college basketball (hence the name of the web site “The Mid-Majority”), the BCS teams outnumber the non-BCS conferences in FBS, 65 to 55. Even with a playoff the BCS conferences would keep a larger proportion of the money than in college basketball, so maybe they’d still make more money than they do now. Moreover, what if the gap between football and basketball is even larger in the regular season? If a playoff would increase the gap to the level the regular season is at, wouldn’t football still make more money? But what about the devaluing the regular season – wouldn’t the increase in value of a playoff be offset by the decrease in value of the regular season? And we’re back to needing to have proved the regular season won’t be appreciably devalued. And what about the teams in the non-BCS conferences? Many early-round games would need to be played against them, and games against no-names don’t put butts in seats (in the stadium or at home). In general, BCS teams have more fans than non-BCS ones – why should the BCS teams have to ship a boatload of money to the smaller non-BCS teams and have a good chunk of the new money brought in by a playoff tainted by that? But if we have games on campus sites that will pump ticket sales primarily into the coffers of BCS schools shifting the balance back to them…

So not only is the money argument tangential to the concerns people actually care about, it’s really impossible to argue concretely in the absence of hard, relevant numbers.

Tomorrow I’ll address some of the comments people have left regarding this series and cover points not made so far – to the extent I have any.

The example of Miami and Florida State (in 2000) shows that college football can’t rank every single team based on their record. Despite the complaints about how unfair it is that non-BCS teams have no shot at the national championship, no person in their right mind that’s not a Mountain West or WAC homer would put up with Utah-Boise State as the 2009 National Championship game. Members of BCS conferences would complain that they’re being punished for being in good conferences and the tendency to schedule cupcakes would get even worse. Ranking every team based on record, without regard to schedule, benefits the non-BCS conferences but it rarely actually selects the best teams that managed to escape good conferences. The system is biased against the non-BCS teams for a reason, people. A playoff is the only approach fair to both the BCS and non-BCS conferences.

But if we can’t seed teams based on their record, how do we seed teams? Under the framework Ed Gunther uses to frame the argument, we can’t use a BCS-like ranking system; it’s too subjective for our objective playoff. So what can we use? Gunther proposes the following strawman:

The anti-playoff side likes to frame the issue another way. If we created a playoff, like the pro-playoff fans want, but didn’t have the rankings, we’d need a way to choose which teams get to participate in the playoff. One of the most reliable ways would be to take the conference champions and a few wildcard teams, just like the NFL does. So here’s the NFL playoff laid overtop of college football: first off, all of the NFL’s divisions have the same access to the playoff and title game. So all eleven conferences (the college version of divisions) would all have to be equal and have the same access to the playoff. So the SunBelt is on equal footing with the SEC, the MAC with the Big10, etc. Sound good? Let’s keep going. To automatically get into the playoff, all you have to do is win your division/conference. So the champion of the SunBelt is in, while the second place team in the SEC might not be, depending on the wild card. Winning the MAC holds the same weight as winning the Big10 or Big12. Do we really need to go on? No.

Yes, we do, because the notion of selecting all 11 conference champions isn’t the insane strawman you seem to think it is. Winning the MAC might hold the same weight as the Big 10 or Big 12, but no one in their right mind thinks they’re making it to the championship game, negotiating their way through more than six BCS teams also littering the bracket, unless they have some mettle. What’s more, if the second-place team in the SEC doesn’t necessarily get in (which isn’t really terribly different from what exists now and what people want, 2008 Texas and 2006 Michigan notwithstanding), that means all the teams in the SEC have to give their all to get that one guaranteed bid to the playoff. (Psst! Importance of the regular season!)

A more appropriate comparison would be with the NCAA basketball tournament, which selects 31 conference champions and 34 at-large teams. In a sixteen-team playoff, selecting 11 conference champions would leave room for five at-large teams. Those at-large teams would likely all be BCS conference teams in any practical system, giving the BCS conferences 11 spots. (In simulated 11/5 systems based on the BCS standings last year, TCU picked up the last at-large bid. However, in my simulated system that used a committee-of-me, I plucked Georgia Tech ahead of TCU, Oklahoma State, and a dark horse bid by Pittsburgh.) Maybe the Sun Belt champion isn’t, strictly speaking, one of the top 16 teams in the country, and maybe they don’t strictly “deserve” to go to the playoff – maybe they’re significantly worse than any of the BCS conference teams in the playoff. So they’ll probably end up stashed at the bottom of the ladder, with the 15 or 16 seed, providing a relative cupcake for the 1 or 2 seed. The MWC and WAC champions are often very good teams, but the MAC, C-USA, and Sun Belt champions aren’t, so the 13 seed would be a relatively mediocre conference champion but one from a weak BCS conference or one of the better mid-majors. The top three seeds would play relative cupcakes in the first round, and once you got to four or lower, the intensity of the games ratchets up considerably. Teams at the top of the ladder would covet one of those top three seeds and an easy first-round game. (Psst! Importance of the regular season! No tanking down the stretch!)

Gunther’s point is that it’s unfair (or widely seen as such) to the best conferences to treat the BCS conferences and the non-BCS conferences completely equally, and thus some sort of subjective ranking system is needed to balance pro-BCS conference bias and anti-BCS conference bias (the latter of which is aka a faux golden mean). Thus even a playoff would need a BCS-type system to determine what teams were best over the course of the whole season. But here Gunther seems to have a rather broad definition of “ranking”. It’s true that the NCAA basketball selection committee creates a seed list of the 65 teams in its tournament to guide the seeding process, but it’s not a hard and fast rule. And that’s precisely what I use when creating my simulated 11/5 system at the end of the year, selecting the five at-larges and seeding the 16 teams in the tournament myself. The BCS is designed to select two teams, not 16 (especially when three of those sixteen are outside the top 25), based on polls (which are rooted in nothing but subjective opinions) and computer rankings (which are convoluted, often designed for gambling and not picking a champion, distrusted, and no one knows how they work anyway). The NCAA basketball selection process is carried out by a group of people who are given simple and reasonable computer numbers, such as the RPI and a simple strength of schedule formula, and other relevant facts. As long as the playoff selectors weren’t motivated to say “let’s include Notre Dame even though they don’t deserve to be in because they draw eyeballs and give them a higher seed than they deserve so they go deeper and pop more ratings”, the latter approach would be far superior for college football, possibly even if we were to stick with the BCS.

You’re not getting rid of controversy. There’ll just be controversy as to who gets in from the at-large pool. At least we won’t have any more undefeated teams with no chance of playing for a national championship. A five-team at-large pool is big enough that it should include any team with any legitimate claim to being the best team in college football, and by the point we get to the edge we’re talking about two, three, or even four-loss teams that probably don’t have a real shot at winning the whole thing anyway. (Which is why I’m not making it any bigger and including less worthy teams.) Does anyone really think that the teams on the bubble of the NCAA basketball tournament ever have any real shot at winning the national championship, George Mason notwithstanding? As we’ll see later, a 16-team playoff does a good job of including every team that, in past years, loudly proclaimed they were worthy of a shot at the national championship – even in the chaotic year of 2007.

I think Gunther’s fatal flaw is both implicit throughout his examination of people who oppose a playoff and made explicit in his introduction. Gunther seems to think (or at least consider a reasonable strawman) that if the season were objective all the way through, it would crown the team that was the absolute best: “Team A beats Team C, and Team B beats Team D, then Team A beats Team B = Team A is the best.” In other words, if the NFL had no regular season, if it just started right in with a 32-team tournament, the team it crowned would always be the best. Gunther doesn’t seem to consider that upsets can occur anywhere. What if the best team lost in the first round? What if a team got an upset, had lucky things happen to eliminate tough opponents before they got to them, and made it at least to the Super Bowl as a mediocre at best team? If Roger Federer loses in the first round, does that change the fact he’s the best player, or does it just mean that someone managed to get to him on that day? At least with the Florida Gators ranked #1 in the preseason we’ll know that if they fall out of the title picture it’s because they’re not as good a team as we thought. Ditto the Pittsburgh Steelers or New England Patriots and the NFL playoff picture. But if the team that everyone thought was best loses in the first round, how do we know that isn’t just because they had an off day? And don’t past rounds of the tournament become as meaningless as a regular season would be with each successive round? Isn’t it logical that if a regular season without a playoff (the BCS) doesn’t produce a clear-cut champion, a playoff without a regular season doesn’t produce any reading of the best team either?

(A quick irrelevant digression, that I couldn’t find any better place to put: there are, apparently, some opponents that would moan about a playoff producing rematches between teams that met in the regular season, rendering the original game between the teams irrelevant because this game is the one that counts. Didn’t the team that won the first matchup already prove they’re better? Gunther’s proponents would counter that that game didn’t really “prove” anything, since it’s one fallible game, but why should this game “prove” anything any more? They’re both individual fallible games. Most sane playoff proposals should be set up to avoid rematches at least in the early rounds.)

Devil’s advocate time: you can make a case that, because college football barely even gives you a hint as to what the absolute best team might be, the burden of that would have to fall on a playoff that isn’t well suited for that purpose, and Gunther’s strawman in the last paragraph would have more relevance than in other sports. Precisely because we mix up two definitions of who’s “best”, the winner of the playoff would be considered, indisputably, the best team in the country. Was Texas really better than USC in 2005, or just on the day they took the field? We’ll never know, but we take it for granted that they were, and with a playoff a team doesn’t even need to be ranked in the top two to end up being considered the undisputed best team in the country, regardless of whether they actually were. That’s why the NHL awards one trophy for having the best record in the regular season and another for winning the Stanley Cup Playoffs (although best-of-seven series make it less likely that a team will just get lucky). That brings me to what Gunther sees as the core of the argument.

A playoff won’t give us the best team at the end of the season, only the hottest or the one best able to avoid – or pull off – upsets. Under Gunther’s framework, the counterpoint of this is simple and seemingly self-evident: that the BCS doesn’t give us a single, clear-cut champion, just who a bunch of pollsters think should be the champion. But it’s not necessarily the case that a clear-cut champion is the sole province of a playoff, just as it isn’t necessarily the case that the best team can only be crowned by the BCS. Each system can agree with the other sometimes. Again, no one disputed that Texas was a deserving champion after the 2006 Rose Bowl; it might as well have come after the end of a long playoff. That’s because there wasn’t a “split title” where another team claimed they should be champions. Similarly, sometimes a team is so dominant that the championship game is just a coronation – consider the 1972 Miami Dolphins, or the 1985 Chicago Bears, or the Bulls teams of the 1990s, or even the 2009 UConn women’s basketball team. No one doubts that the best team won, because they were dominant in the regular season in a way no one else was. A matchup between two teams everyone thinks is the best two in the country isn’t any worse because it came at the end of a playoff – in fact the playoff itself may suffer for it because it just seems like a prelude to the main course. Ultimately, part of the reason no one ever follows through on their threats to leave the sport because of the injustices of the BCS is because if you have a matchup between two titans, it doesn’t matter how you got there.

So, to what extent does a playoff give us the best team, and to what extent does the BCS give us a single champion? Arguing under Gunther’s framework, proponents of a playoff would argue that the playoff consists of a lot of very good teams, and the winner of the playoff is obviously the best of them. Opponents would argue that the BCS standings reflect a consensus on what the best two teams are, which means it’s more clear-cut than it often receives credit for (again ignoring the mid-major bugaboo). Both of these arguments are patently false – a team that barely snuck into the playoffs could go all the way and win it all, and that wouldn’t mean they were the best team over the course of the season, and the latter argument is even more absurd, as anyone who thinks the BCS reflects a “consensus” hasn’t looked very closely at the numerous years of controversy, the corruption of the polls, and the fact computers can go against the consensus of humans. What’s more, I never hear the latter argument, since Gunther misconstrues where opponents are coming from, and the closest I hear to the former argument is in another context.

But still, at least the former argument hasn’t been completely demolished (yet). The 2007 Giants or 2008 Cardinals may not have been the best teams in the country, but they clearly must have been better than they got credit for (or that their record suggested) if they won three games against supposedly better teams, four in the case of the Giants. Where the argument goes wrong is that while it’s one thing for one team to pull off a string of upsets, it’s quite another if they’re the beneficiary of another team’s upsets. If the 5 seed in the NCAA Tournament makes the Final Four because the 1, 2, 3, and 4 seeds all fell before facing them, they haven’t really proven anything, other than that they can beat the 6, 7, 8, or even 9 seed. George Mason faced freakin’ Wichita State in the Sweet 16 the year they made their famous run.

Fortunately, Gunther proposes two more realistic – and common – arguments. Building on the brief success of the last argument, proponents note that usually, a playoff should crown the best team in the country, certainly more often than the BCS produces a champion everyone’s happy with. Gunther’s opponents counter that at least the BCS will never give the title to the team that in reality is eighth best (or even worse). Or does it? Think back to 2007, when there was a complete clusterbleep regarding who would face Ohio State in the national championship game. Any team in the top nine in the BCS standings could have conceivably been plucked to play the Buckeyes, and the only reason 12-0 Hawaii at #10 didn’t have a shot was because they were a non-BCS team. USC, which ended the season seventh, won the Rose Bowl, but crushed an Illinois team a lot of people didn’t think deserved to be in the BCS at all. USC had a mediocre resume with losses to Stanford and Oregon, but they could have easily gone to the BCS Championship Game if enough pollsters took pity on them, gotten lucky, and won. How do we know LSU, who won the title game that year, was really better than any of the eight teams below them, except maybe the ones they played? (Don’t try to muddle the issue by claiming it wouldn’t have happened under the old bowl system. What if USC had beaten Ohio State in the Rose Bowl?)

Technically it’s more accurate to claim, at least for Gunther’s vision of those that oppose a playoff, that the BCS will still give the title to a team that can claim to be the best team – but that’s in fact a minor concession on their part, since an eight-team playoff in 2007 would have achieved much the same goal, no matter how many upsets occurred – even if the eight seed won the title, they could conceivably claim to be best in the regular season as well. This brings us back to college football’s small sample size. What if I told you that in 2005, the best team in college football wasn’t Texas or USC, but West Virginia? The Mountaineers only had one loss on the entire season – they were just unlucky that day, just as Florida was unlucky last year when they lost to Ole Miss. And they did win their bowl game, topping the champions of the mighty SEC in Georgia. But they finished eleventh in the bowl-determining BCS standings, a seven seed in an eight-team tournament that granted BCS champion auto bids, and based on the BCS standings, a ten seed in a sixteen-team tournament that granted auto bids to all 11 conference champions.

This brings us back to the devil’s advocate position at the end of the last argument – college football’s regular season is so insufficient that almost any winner of a playoff could be considered the best in the regular season as well. At no point in the BCS era would an eight-team playoff based on the BCS standings have selected a non-conference champion with more than two losses. On the conference champion side, what if I told you that the best team in 2008 was Virginia Tech (who did win their bowl game, albeit against Cincinnati, an almost-as-weak Big East champion) and the best conference the ACC? You’d laugh until you looked at the clusterbleep of the ACC standings and saw that nearly every team had a shot to go to the ACC Championship Game. The SEC likes to claim they should get the benefit of the doubt for sometimes-weak records because every team in the SEC is so great that there’s so much parity that teams beat each other up; doesn’t that go double for the ACC? (The Hokies finished the regular season nineteenth in the BCS standings; under the same playoff formats as before, V-Tech would have been dead last in an eight-team playoff and 13th in a 16-team playoff.) You can’t claim the Giants were the best team in the NFL in 2007, and you can’t even claim the Cardinals were the best team in the NFC in 2008 despite the fact they won a division (well, you can, but it’s difficult); the NFL schedules are too balanced. You can make a case for any of thirteen (well, twelve) teams being the best in the country every single year, admittedly of varying levels of plausibility. (You hear that, Stewart Mandel?) A 16-team playoff would still select a smaller proportion of teams in FBS than any other playoff existing today. It may not be the ideal scenario for people who oppose a playoff for Gunther’s reasons, but that’s the way college football is and shall be.

(That Mandel link leads me to bring up an argument none of Gunther’s analysis brings up, which is the difficulty level to make a Cinderella run. The Cardinals would not happen in college football because they would not get the benefit of the doubt just for winning the division; winning a weak conference would not guarantee home field advantage in any round, as it did for the Cardinals, and locking up your conference early would not necessarily be an excuse to tank. The Giants had to win three tough road games against very good teams, though, just to make the Super Bowl against a fourth, and even in a sixteen-team format one of those games would probably be significantly easier; to beat 1, 2, and 3 seeds in the last three rounds of a sixteen-team format you would start out beating a 6 or 7 seed. A George Mason run might be of comparable difficulty in a sixteen-team format, and harder in a smaller format but with better teams to pull it off.)

The response Gunther’s opponents would have to the argument that a playoff should usually produce the best team is twofold, and in some sense, we covered them both earlier. In fact, the second response is precisely that it devalues the regular season. The first one:

A playoff breaks their definition of a best champion because first, teams will play different amounts of games in the season. With an 8-team playoff in college football, some teams would play 12 games and some would play 16 – that’s 33% more games, which is too big of a competitive gap to equally compare teams and their achievements.

But that’s pretty much immaterial, since ideally, the teams in the championship game have already established themselves as being on another level than the teams that aren’t in the playoffs, during the regular season. That’s why we need to make the playoff big enough to accommodate every team with a claim to be the best in college football. And teams within the playoff would play a varying number of games, with the teams in the championship game playing only one more game than the teams they beat in the semifinals. Given the way Gunther phrases this argument, and given the way Gunther’s opponents would presumably be okay with the bowl system where winning teams play one more game than losing ones, it seems to imply opponents would be okay with a gap that small. Wider gaps, like the one between the participants in the championship game and the quarterfinal losers, are more problematic; fortunately, my solution to the sanctity of the bowls solvdevalues es that problem, or at least widens it by one round. Stay tuned.

In fact, this argument itself suffers from two problems. First, it’s effectively saying the college football season is too small for a playoff. It’s too small for the regular season alone to give us sufficient data either; deal with it. The second one Gunther acknowledges, but not as a problem:

Basically, the anti-playoff side knows that their subjective champion is debatable, and the way they choose to make that debate fair is to make sure every team has the same amount of information (aka, number & type of games) available for voters to look at. If a few of the teams have more performances on a bigger stage, it makes the situation unfair even before voters begin the debate, the big no-no of the subjective side.

“But the whole point of a playoff is that it removes the subjectivity of a poll”, you say. But this is where we get into the problem Gunther’s opponents have with the notion of a playoff determining a claimant to the title of the best team with the same or similar veracity as the BCS, and the reason why I proposed that notion as a devil’s advocate argument, proposed by Gunther’s opponents rather than to them. It seems to me that Gunther’s opponents would accept the games in a playoff, but not necessarily the winner of the playoff as the automatic national champion. It’s as though the NHL’s Presidents Trophy were awarded to the team with the most combined points in the regular season and postseason. After all, the AP doesn’t always accept the winner of the BCS national championship game as its champion, because of the body of work their champion produced over the course of the season, and they still do a poll after the Final Four and don’t have to select the winner of the national championship if they don’t want to. Gunther’s opponents don’t want to separate the regular season and the playoffs, because they’re all still games played by the teams in question. Most people would call this a false position, a strawman inflicted on themselves, since the vast majority of people have no problem separating the regular season and the playoffs, and this is one reason I’m doubtful Gunther is properly reading the motives of opponents for anyone but himself.

But it’s harder to shake, and less of a strawman, when you consider that in college football, the playoff needs to play the role of helping determine the best team over the course of the whole season. The regular season is insufficient for that purpose, so any postseason, in the eyes of Gunther’s opponents, needs to be both a regular season and a playoff. We’ll see elements of attempts to resolve this contradiction later, when we take a look at some proposed playoff formats, including Gunther’s own suggestion. But this problem is rarely made explicit – the one attempt to resolve this contradiction other than Gunther himself is more concerned about the overall sanctity of the regular season – and so I don’t think it’s on top of mind for most opponents of a playoff. Besides which, the only real solution is to make the regular season itself longer – or institute a playoff so teams have more motivation to schedule tough to improve playoff seeding and chances of making the playoff. Whichever way you slice it, we’re not going to get better at determining the best team in college football without a playoff, and ultimately, people with the same ultimate motivations for opposing a playoff Gunther attributes to them might actually be better off with one.

And even if the team that would have been the best gets upended in an upset, well, we love upsets in March, don’t we?