The seeding would be quite a bit different than what was announced today. The reason why is that the top 4 seeds in the 12-team bracket are reserved for conference champions only.
So the top four CCs are:
Georgia
Michigan
Clemson
Utah
And would get the first weekend off with byes.
The first round matchups:
12 Tulane at 5 TCU
11 Penn State at 6 Ohio State
10 USC at 7 Alabama
9 K-State at 8 Tennessee
Tulane and K-State are the last two automatic bids for conference winners; the other six are at-large.
Utah would play the TCU-Tulane winner, Clemson would get the aOSU-PSU winner, Michigan gets the Bama-USC winner and Georgia gets the Tenn-KSU winner.
Notre Dame is nowhere close to the playoffs, but if they were, the can’t be any higher than a 5 seed because they can’t be a conference champ. Same for Liberty and BYU, although BYU is about to resolve its independent status.
I think reserved for conference champs is total Bull Shinola.
I think you rank the top 12 teams and you seed them. PERIOD.
You could end up with a conference champ that 7-4 getting a bye due to a weak conference and have several teams 10-2 from brutal conferences having to play.
If they are remotely interested in a field of the best 12 teams and seeding it fairly, reserving spots just make the whole thing messed up.
That’s unlikely. K-State is a 10-3 conference champ and they wouldn’t get a bye. Especially now that divisions are going away. LSU would not have been in the SECCG in a no-division system, and they wouldn’t have gotten a bye if they had won either.
And they couldn’t sell the expansion to about 10 other leagues without giving priority to conference winners. Remember the ACC and Big Ten blew up the identical plan last year because of similar concerns – and the ACC wound up shooting itself in the foot as a result.
3-loss Utah is getting a bye, while 12-1 TCU would have to play in the first round and then against Utah in the semis. Tells me all I need to know that the proposed expansion with conference champs being guaranteed the top 4 spots is ridiculous.
You hate the system anyway so everything about it strikes you as ridiculous. If it was the other way around you’d be bitching that conference champions are getting screwed.
To which I have four words: Get used to it. It ain’t changing.
Are they doing this because conference champs have to play an extra game via their conference championship game? Or are they doing away with those games?
Hate the fact that some feel like you need 12 teams to find the best 2. That’s what the 12 games of the regular season should have done.
As to complaining about conference champs being left out, nope. I’ve got no issue with Utah and Kansas State being out of the top 4 this year because they don’t have a valid argument to play for a National Championship.
Nobody is getting rid of their conference championship that I know of. I think the idea was to try to finish the playoffs without going deep into January which is NFL time. But they’re going to be up against the NFL anyway with Saturday playoff games in December unless the NFL backs off, which I doubt.