…..There Were A National NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision Playoff?

This season will be the last one with a two team BCS championship contest.  Next year, it expands to a four team format.  What if the NCAA sponsored a championship playoff for FBS like it does for every other sport that they sanction?  Say it’s a 16 team format.  Like the other sports, all of the conference champions will be “in”.  That leaves spots for 6 at large teams.

The NCAA uses a selection committee for the playoff teams for the other sports.  How can I mimic that?  I will be using a pair wise ranking method (PWR) that was developed many years ago by US College Hockey Online.  Their PWR has accurately predicted the participants of the NCAA Division 1 hockey playoffs since their PWR’s inception.  The method measures teams against each other using the following criteria, Ratings Percentage Index (RPI), head to head record (HTH), record against Teams Under Consideration (TUC) and Record Against Common Opponents (RACO).  The RPI is used as a tie breaker if necessary.

The first step of the process is to determine which teams will be in the list of Teams Under Consideration.  Since I am not smart enough to write a computer routine to calculate the results of all of the FBS teams I am going to limit the selection to the top twenty teams by RPI as calculated by Wobus Sports plus any conference champions that fall outside that list.

Since most of the conference championships are still up for grabs, I will continue the qualifications of TUC next week.

Stay tuned…