Mythical College Football Playoff- Final Seeding

As I mentioned in last night’s post, we have a big problem with the raw seeding of my Imaginary Mythical National NCAA FBS Football Playoff.  Here it is repeated for reference:

bracket 1

Today I discovered one smaller one. Both of these can be fixed.  An important (if not most important) criteria for selecting and seeding an NCAA playoff is revenue.  The NCAA wants to generate the big bucks from TV and box office sales.  Rematches between teams are not good for either TV ratings or box office sales.  The big problem that I must fix is having a rematch of Stanford and Oregon in the first round.  It is unavoidable that they might meet in later rounds, but first round is unacceptable.  At least in college hockey, the NCAA has been known to tweak the seeding to fix problems like this.

We can flip 5th seed Stanford and 6th seed Ohio St, then flip 11th seed Arizona St with 10th seed UCF.  Now our bracket looks like this:

bracket 2

Now Oregon and Stanford can not meet until the final round.  This is good.  Futher, we can’t have a Stanford vs. Arizona St rematch until the semi-final round.

Second problem: we can have a Michigan St vs. Ohio St rematch in the second round.  This is not horrible but let’s see if we can fix it.  We can flip 4th seed Michigan St with 3rd seed Alabama.  Now the bracket looks like this:

bracket 3

 

Now Michigan St and Ohio St can not meet until the final round.

I just noticed another problem.  We can have a Missouri vs. Auburn rematch in the second round.  This is easily fixed by flipping 7th seed Missouri with 8th seed Baylor.  Now Missouri and Auburn can only meet in the final round and Missouri and Ohio St can not meet until the semi-final round.

Here is the final bracket:

bracket 4

 

We now have no in conference rematches until the semi-final round and the bracket is set.  I realize the brackets are fuzzy and kind of hard to read so here is the final field in clearer text.

Final Seed Original Seed Team
1 1 Florida St
2 2 Auburn
3 4 Michigan St
4 3 Alabama
5 6 Ohio St
6 5 Stanford
7 8 Baylor
8 7 Missouri
9 9 South Carolina
10 11 Arizona St
11 10 UCF
12 12 Oregon
13 13 Fresno St
14 14 Bowling Green
15 15 Rice
16 16 Louisiana Lfyt

 

 

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