My favorite sport is — and has been — the strangest goddamn sport on planet Earth. No other sport in the world would dare try to crown a champion while not having all the competitors able to compete for the title. Yet, for all of its existence, American collegiate football has done just this.
Well, sort of anyways…
See, the problem is, when it was started, it was just a bunch of college dudes out there, piddling away with whatever Frankenstein of a ruleset they could cobble together. Shame on you, weirdo 19th century schoolboy from Connecticut, for not seeing that the weird dumbass version of the English FA’s rules you just made up would become America’s biggest sport in about 100 years.
Unlike all the other codes of football though, the American collegiate game had no real interest in forming codified championships on a national scale. In a nation so vast, distance so spectacularly far away, who would do it. Instead, the sport became immersed very early on in rivalries between schools, rivalries with individual teams. Princeton-Rutgers, Harvard-Yale, this was college football’s version of the ultimate title. It was never about competing against everyone and winning, but rather rubbing your fat ass right in the face of the guy who is nearly the same as you, but just happened through coincidence, chance, or other bullshit to choose a different school.
And so it went. For decades.
Have I mentioned bowl games? No? Ah shit!
Instead of a championship game, a bunch of cities in warmer climates said, “Hey, I have an idea, lets pitch the idea of a bowl game as a nice little sending off party for a team in a place that isn’t below freezing to Midwesterners with a bit of money to spend!” Thus, the Rose Bowl was born, followed a few decades later by the Sugar Bowl, the Orange Bowl, and Cotton Bowls — these were the four big boy bowl games, the games you busted your ass for a shot to play in.
Others came into being, some weirder than others. Oh sure, pre-Castro Havana and San Diego did bowl games, but so did Evansville, Dayton, and Cleveland.
Nowadays though, there are more bowls than has ever been, and over half the teams in FBS go to bowl games. The money spent by city and state tourism boards, and the desire for non-title teams to end their season with a competitive game against an opponent they may not see much is always going to be enticing, means that we’re likely stuck with this.
This is the environment in which college football has formed and flourished, and only in 2014 did even the semblance of a playoff come into being. Mostly, we just had sports writers or computers pick who they thought was better, and by the late 1990s, we had a title game between #1 and #2 decided on those same criteria.
Now though, it’s better.1 Instead of an environment in which people have to care about more teams because there’s no satisfying conclusion, we get an obsessive hyperfixation on, at most, 10 teams because of a coverage style that emphasizes the playoff above everything else. At four teams, the playoff is just the right size to drown out everything else. The two-team BCS format that ran from 1998 to 2013 made it to where a title shot every year was an unreasonable prospect, thus, even casual fans had to care about winning conference titles and premier bowl games. A four-team playoff makes competing for a national title every year a realistic possibility if you are the elite of the elite.
A 8 or 12 team format has been floated to spice things up, but these lose one of college football’s true charms — the regular season being like a weird playoff in and of itself, where every game feels like a World Cup knockout stage game because, in effect, it is, just on a more localized level. Losing just one game makes things tricky for your national title prospects, and two makes it extremely unlikely you’ll get anywhere close. Three losses — you would still have to win 75% of the games you played, which in any other sport is a huge accomplishment — takes you out totally.
A playoff system for FBS needs to take every bit of the aforementioned reasons into account. You need to be able to still accommodate bowl games, be able to have every team in the division have a theoretical shot to win it, and also keep the collective insanity that is college football’s regular season.
With all that in mind, I present: THE LADDER!
What’s The Ladder?
The ladder is simple in design. 12 teams are seeded 1 through 12 after the conclusion of the regular season. Instead of conference title game weekend — oh yeah, we’re getting rid of conference title games, which is not a wholly insane proposal — these 12 teams would play each other during the same weekend. These 12 teams would then be reseeded and play on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day to determine who goes to the national title game.
That begs a few questions:
How do you determine conference champions?
How is the “playoff” seeded, and how are matchups determined then, if it’s a non power-of-2 amount of teams?
What is the selection criteria?
Conference champions would be determined by the way they used to be; whoever had the best record in conference play. If there was more than one team that shared the best record in the league, the title would be split between teams, meaning that there could be more than one, or even more than two conference champions in a given year2.
Seeding can be done any number of ways, but if you need to just have the playoff committee’s rankings, that’d be okay. However, the best approach is probably a BCS model where a combination of computer rankings and human polls, since these rankings are both published every week and tend to move in predictable ways, unlike the playoff committee’s. For this example, I’ll be using the account @BCSKnowHow’s simulated BCS rankings from November 30th.
Matchups are determined by a team’s seed. Instead of a 1v12, 2v11 matchup, this will be 1v7, 2v8, 3v9, etc. This gives you two big upsides; good matchups throughout the rounds, and also narrows down a 12-team, 2 round playoff quicker than normal seeding would.
Selection criteria would be like this; there would be at least 9 conference champions and 3 at-large spots. A co-champion counts as much as an outright champion for the 9 mark.3 At least 3 conference champions have to be G5 teams.
The Ladder in Action
For the 2021 ladder, your selections — drumroll please:
Georgia (SEC champion)
Michigan (Big Ten co-champion)
Alabama (at-large)
Cincinnati (American co-champion)
Oklahoma State (Big XII champion)
Notre Dame (at-large)
Ohio State (Big Ten co-champion)
Ole Miss (at-large)
Wake Forest (ACC co-champion)
Pitt (ACC co-champion)
San Diego State (Mountain West champion)
Houston (American co-champion)
With the seedings done, your matchups are as follows. These games would ideally be at home campus sites of the higher seed, meaning Ann Arbor would get an SEC team in December up there.
Lets have some fun with this now, shall we?
With the matchups in place, lets see how the first round would play out. Using Massey’s matchup tool, I’ll simulate each game, mark the result, and show how the ladder works.
In this simulation, we had:
Georgia defeats Ohio State 30-26
Ole Miss defeats Michigan 38-17
Alabama defeats Wake Forest 49-36
Pitt defeats Cincinnati 28-20
Oklahoma State defeats San Diego State 31-12
Notre Dame defeats Houston 26-23
With those done, we can advance to reseeding. Put it simply, if you win, you go up, and if you lose, you go down. The winners move up to spots 1-6, and the losers move down to spots 7-12. Higher seeds from the first round are put over lower seeds. For the New Year’s bowl games, our seeding is now this.
Georgia
Alabama
Oklahoma State
Notre Dame
Ole Miss
Pitt
Michigan
Cincinnati
Ohio State
Wake Forest
San Diego State
Houston
The same matchup format from round one is used. Instead of picking teams, the NY6 bowls would pick matchups. Based on historical conference affiliations and regional matchups, a NYE/NYD slate for these teams would look something like this.
From here, the game is simple; the two highest seeds that win move on to the national title game. Simulated results for such a scenario would look like this:
Georgia beats Michigan 42-20
Cincinnati beats Alabama 22-14
Oklahoma State beats Ohio State 30-16
Notre Dame beats Wake Forest 37-14
San Diego State beats Ole Miss 34-15
Pitt beats Houston 34-31
Since our two highest seeded teams to win were Georgia and Oklahoma State, those teams would move on to the national championship game.4
Why On Earth is This a Good Idea?
I said when I introduced this newsletter that the idea I was cooking up was “wonderful.” And this idea is, at least for FBS college football and this specific purpose. There are no added games to the schedule; the max a team would play is 15, as it is now. Teams can’t slip up too much in conference play because 75% of the seeds go to conference champions. They also can’t lose more than one or two games overall, since that would dramatically lower a team’s seeding.
As is also apparent here, seeding is vital. The higher a team’s seed is, the less that has to happen above them for that team to play for a national title. #1 and #2 control their own destinies, but have to play two top caliber games in a row to get in. Meanwhile, at #12, a team needs to win both games and hope other teams lose in front of them in order to make the national title game.
This may seem like a bug, but it’s actually a key feature. It makes sense that the top seed should have a much easier road than the 12th seed. Sports — unlike the hellworld that we actually have to exist in — do reward hard work and actually being better at what you do than everyone else. A #1 seed then, is just the better team at the end of the day, and deserves the reward that comes with it.
The effort to squeeze out the weird in college football has long been under way. Nothing about the direction the sport is taking is going to change that; the playoff models are simply ways to make more money, as were the conference title games, as has been everything else in this sport for the 31 years I’ve been on this Earth. Champions aren’t decided by sportswriters anymore, not because it was injust, but because someone saw that real cash was in those bowls over yonder.
Capitalism squeezes out any defect, any little hill in the terrain that makes us fond or love a place more. The sheer absurdity of college football, the rivalries, the stupid little trophies that two teams have been playing for since some player named “Jumpin” Jack stole a pig from a farm in 1924 — those are all going away. Before you know it, all that’s left are broken hyperlinks and HTML 1.0 formatting that showed you that time before, that weird time your ignorant self loved.
This sport is at a crossroads; money will take it over. As Felix Biederman explained in his Dorktown series “Fighting in the Age of Loneliness” with Jon Bois, the passion that made mixed martial arts so great was destroyed by the UFC’s expansion. All that was left was a sport where you touch gloves, go out, and fight every day, anonymous as it may be.
College football will be like that at some point, but right now it isn’t. What gave the sport its identity is what is my little playoff system does, and does as well as any other expansion format out there.
It is fun and weird, and at the end of the day, isn’t life best like that?
it’s worse
This happened as recently as 2010. That year, the Big East had UConn, West Virginia, and Pitt all as conference co-champions with 5-2 conference records.
No, Notre Dame doesn’t get an exemption, nor does BYU. Both teams must make it from at-large selection as long as they don’t play in a conference.
In case you’re wondering, Oklahoma State beat Georgia 27-24 in the national title game in this simulation.