12 Days of Playoffs: 1st Round

I’m convinced we will all look back at the BCS system as a legitimate way to crown college football’s national champion and laugh at its absurdity, if not cringe at how archaic it was.

We live in a world where you can fly through the air at 600 MPH in a seat while watching streaming videos of, literally, any topic you can possibly think of and yet the dozens of people who are responsible for college sports can’t come to a conclusion on how to play 15 postseason football games that would make them a billion dollars. That seems strange. And idiotic.

Why wait 20 years though when we can have our own playoff on PFB today? For the next 12 weekdays on here, we’ll be staring at, contemplating, and voting for the teams you see in the bracket below.

I have a feeling I know who’s going to win, but I want to see how it all plays out.

A few parameters before we get started.

The teams were chosen by taking all 11 conference winners (so, like March Madness, everybody gets a shot) and then the five highest ranked BCS teams in order regardless of conference affiliation. They were then seeded according to their BCS ranking. The three lowest seeds (NIU, LA Tech, and Ark St.) don’t have a BCS ranking so I used Sagarin’s rating for them.

The first two rounds will, hypothetically, be played at the higher seed’s home stadium.

The semis and finals will be played at neutral sites, for our purposes we’ll call the semis the Fiesta and Orange bowls and the Finals will be the Rose Bowl.

You can only vote once for each game but I’ll leave each round open for a while so as many people as possible can vote.

I’ll update the bracket, who advanced, and what the votes looked like as we go throughout the 12 days.

Happy voting, and happy dreaming about a playoff…

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Click below to enlarge bracket.

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