Born Weird

According to my grand vision for restructuring college football, today would be the second round of the playoffs. But what would they look like this year?

It’s hard to say for sure since my conference realignment plan would affect regular-season scheduling, conference championships, and thus BCS (now P) rankings. But here’s how they might look, assuming:

• SEC, ACC and Big XII championships remain unchanged
• Cincinnati ekes by Pittsburgh in the Big East championship (just like what happened to end the season)
• Ohio State defeats Iowa in the Really Big Ten final
• Oregon beats Arizona in the Pac-12 championship
• TCU wins over Boise State in the Big West final

That leaves us with seven automatic qualifiers and 5 at-large bids, seeded according to BCS/P ranking. Our bracket would then look something like so:

2009 college football playoff bracket, based (more or less) on my reorg plan

You’ll note that these seedings deviate from the final BCS standings, due to the aforementioned conference championship games.

I think this would be fabulous. Maybe a few teams here don’t deserve to be in a playoff (Penn State?) but I think most of the games would be compelling.

FWIW, I’d have BSU, Florida, Oregon and VT advancing past the first round. In today’s games, I’d have Bama over BSU, Florida over Cincy (setting up an SEC title rematch — imagine all the Tebow “redemption” press, ugh), TCU over Oregon in a classic, and VT in a special-teams-driven upset over Texas. You?