'Death to the BCS' and playoff musings
Published: 12/14/2010 7:04 PM
Last Modified: 12/14/2010 7:04 PM
How would Oklahoma football fans feel about another meaningful postseason game against Boise State? An opportunity for revenge? A for further embarrassment, to be avoided at all cost? (Has nobody forgotten the Jan. 1, 2007 Fiesta Bowl?)
One positive to such a matchup for OU fans: It would be played in Norman, not in Arizona. It’s part of the imagined 16-team playoff bracket set forth in the new book “Death to the BCS: The Definitive Case against the Bowl Championship Series.”
Based on extensive interviews and research, authors Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter and Jeff Passan have mounted a convincing indictment of the current BCS system. Whether or not you agree with them, it’s fun to imagine how things would play out in an alternate 2010 universe using their playoff plan to determine the national title.
They propose a four-round tournament comprised of the 11 FBS conference champs and five at-large teams. For seeding and selection, the book suggests a formula similar to the one used for the NCAA Tournament in basketball.
For arguments sake, let’s take a credible facsimile of the BCS rankings. The rankings at collegeBCS.com, the website run by RPI basketball guru Jerry Palm, were used for this formulation.
All games are played on the field of the higher-seeded team through the semifinals. The championship game is played at a neutral site.
The 11 conference champions, with Palm’s BCS rankings in parentheses, are:
SEC - Auburn (1)
Pac 10 - Oregon (2)
Mountain West - TCU (3)
Big Ten - Wisconsin (5)*
Big 12 - Oklahoma (7)
WAC - Boise State (10)*
ACC - Virginia Tech (13)
Conference USA - Central Florida (25)
Big East - UConn (26)
MAC - Miami, Ohio (34)
Sun Belt - Troy (87)
*Wisconsin tied Ohio State and Michigan State for the Big Ten title. Badgers selected because of the higher BCS ranking. This is also the case for Boise, which tied Nevada and Hawaii for the WAC title.
Using collegeBCS, we select these five at-large teams:
Stanford (4)
Ohio State (6)
Arkansas (8)
Michigan State (9)
LSU (11)
Now, the tournament is seeded 1-through-16 using collegeBCS rankings:
1: Auburn
2: Oregon
3: TCU
4: Stanford
5: Wisconsin
6: Ohio State
7: Oklahoma
8: Arkansas
9: Michigan State
10: Boise State
11: LSU
12: Virginia Tech
13: Central Florida
14: UConn
15: Miami, Ohio
16: Troy
Oklahoma, as the seventh seed, hosts Boise State, the 10th seed. Here’s a complete list of the first-round pairings, arranged as they would appear on a bracket with No. 1 Auburn at the top and No. 2 Oregon at the bottom.
In this example, the Auburn-Troy winner would play the Arkansas-MSU winner in the second round, Wisconsin-VTech would play Stanford-UCF, and so on. The OU-Boise winner would play the Oregon-Miami winner in the next round.
Troy (16) at Auburn (1)
Michigan State (9) at Arkansas (8)
Virginia Tech (12) at Wisconsin (5)
UCF (13) at Stanford (4)
UConn (14) at TCU (3)
LSU (11) at Ohio State (6)
Boise State (10) at Oklahoma (7)
Miami, Ohio (15) at Oregon (2)
Draw your own bracket and predict the winners all the way to the final game. Or use one of the 2010 college football video games to play it out. Who wins?
-- Mike Brown
Written by
Mike Strain
News Editor
