After the BCS National Championship game is played on January 6, 2014 between the Florida State Seminoles and the Auburn Tigers, it will mark the end of one era and the beginning of a new era in major college football. Most fans are excited about it, saying a playoff will be a fairer system in determining the National Champion. I can see its merits and understand that it will certainly add to the excitement of the sport, but I don't necessarily agree that it help determine a true champion. Oh well. Nevertheless, the playoff format is set to take place next season, so I thought it would be fun to share how I would think that playoff should look if it was happening this season.
Let me start by saying that every conference should be forced to crown a champion in the same way, whether it be by a conference championship game or by overall regular season record. It matters not to me, but every conference should be the same. It just seems weird that Big 12 teams only played 12 games while pretty much everyone else played 13. I very highly doubt that conferences with a title game would stop doing that, so making every conference have a title game seems the most feasible. Apparently there's some NCAA rule that says there have to be at least 12 teams in a conference in order to host a conference championship game, so either that needs to change or the conferences not in compliance should add some teams and get up to speed.
With all that said, the teams which would compose the mythical 2013 playoff are somewhat obvious it would seem: #1 Florida State, #2 Auburn, #3 Alabama, and #4 Michigan State as ranked by the BCS. The only question is the seeding. Why is there a question you ask? Shouldn't it just be 1v4 and 2v3? In my opinion it should not. I believe that a team should be rewarded for winning their conference championship.
To me the matchups would be:
1-seed Florida State vs. 4-seed Alabama
2-seed Auburn vs. 3-seed Michigan State
Florida State went undefeated, winning the ACC Championship in the process. That's makes them the undisputed 1-seed for me regardless of how bad the ACC might have been or even how dominant they were in winning the games. Just for clarification, if there had been two undefeated conference champions at the top of the BCS rankings, I would have given the team with the higher conference strength of schedule the 1-seed.
Auburn comes away with the 2-seed in what seems like a no-brainer. They were the one-loss champion of the SEC, which was considered the most difficult conference in the country, just in front of the PAC-12.
Michigan State gets the 3-seed despite playing in an inferior conference than Alabama, based on the merits of winning their conference championship as I noted above, which brings me to...
...Alabama who gets the 4-seed. This is solely based on the fact that the Tide did not win their conference title. They had every opportunity to, but in the end lost their season finale to Auburn, who of course went on to take the SEC crown. That seems fair to me. It was determined on the field.
Everyone's first argument against this is that it is not fair to Florida State because they have to play an Alabama team in the semi-final, who many probably still consider the best team in the country despite their one loss and final ranking. Shut up. If you think Alabama is the best team, then Florida State (if FSU won) would have to play them in the championship game anyways, and if they don't then that means they'd have to play the team that beat Alabama. You can't argue that you got a tough draw and also argue that you should have won the National Championship. That doesn't make sense. If you should have won the title, then you should have beaten everyone.
Well there you have it.
Sincerely,
Hungry in Kentucky
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