This year, college football debuts a new playoff format, expanding from 4 teams to 12. In the context of pro sports, or even other college sports, 12 spots for a field of 1341 is incredibly small. But, in the context of college football it is a revolution. The sport’s only even had a 4 team playoff since 2014; before then there was a 2 team format starting in 1998, and before that it was a giant shrug, with media members and coaches just voting on who they thought the best team might be at the end of the season2. As you might imagine, this has created tons of controversy and “what if?”s throughout the history of the sport, with tons of theoretically championship-caliber squads left out for one reason or another.
And honestly, the 12-team format seems really exciting! We only have one season under this format3, but its already led to an incredibly fun regular season, with tons of games deep in November having major stakes they wouldn’t have had previously. So I’ve been inspired to do some alt history. For the next bit, I’m writing a series of OTs, redoing every season of the BCS and 4-team eras under the 12-team format. There’s a lot of fun games and gnashing of teeth we missed out on by dawdling so much.
(I also feel like I need to defend the 12-team format, since it’s likely only going to last 2 years. Current industry scuttlebutt is the all-powerful SEC and Big 10 want a 14 team setup, where each of them are guaranteed at least 4 berths a piece, because god forbid we ever have any fun in this fucking thing, let’s just give the crown to the preseason #1 while we’re at it, it’s unfair to such well-resourced teams that they have to actually win games of football to secure what is rightfully theirs)
So, what is the 12-team format? In the year of your lord 2024, the rules are:
- Teams are ranked by a committee of various athletic directors and other such creatures
- The 5 highest ranked conference champions are guaranteed berths, regardless of what their actual rankings are. (More on this in a minute)
- The 4 highest ranked conference champions are specifically guaranteed seeds 1-4, regardless of what their actual rankings are. (the 5th champ isn’t guaranteed anything other than a berth; in many cases this will mean a de facto #12 seed)
- The remaining 7 teams are “at-large” berths, who don’t have to be conference champions.
- The top 4 seeds are given a first round bye. Seeds 5-8 host seeds 9-12 at their home campuses. The remaining rounds are held at bowl games
So, why 5 champs? There are currently 4 “power” conferences in the sport. This setup is likely to mean an auto berth for each power champ, plus one berth for the mid-majors4. This is similar to the 4-team era New Years 6 format, where one of the major bowl game berths was set aside for a non-power champ, and exists to fend off anti-trust complaints from non-power conferences following various BCS-era controversies. Before the untimely death of the Pac-12, there were 5 power conferences, and reporting on the then-upcoming 12 team format mentioned 6 conference champ auto-bids, not 5. So, the logic is clearly N+1, where “N” is the number of “power” conferences in the given season.
Which means for the BCS era, when there were 6 “Automatic Qualifier” leagues5 we’ll have 7 champs + 5. For the 4-team CFP era, we’ll go to 6+66. And from 2024 on, I won’t have to do anything because reality will handle it for me! But reality will do so with a 5+7 setup.
This is honestly probably too fair to be entirely historically accurate; as we’ll see when we get into it, the BCS wasn’t really interested in sharing with anyone outside of the club, and had to be drug kicking and screaming at many points into at least paying lip service to equal access and fairness. But this is alt history, so where’s the fun if we can’t apply the lessons of the future to the past?
Next time, we kick it off with the inaugural BCS season, and fill out the field for 1998.