What the 2018 Playoff would’ve looked like with 6, 8, or 24 teams

Which of these makes the most sense to you, considering the number of legit contenders the 2018 season produced?

No. 1 Alabama vs. No. 4 Oklahoma
No. 2 Clemson vs. No. 3 Notre Dame

This is fine.

Georgia is probably one of the four best teams, but is deservedly out. Ohio State is a one-loss Power 5 champ, but lost to a 6-6 Purdue by 29 points, in case you missed that. UCF is undefeated again, but played no team better than 8-5 Memphis twice (if UCF did get a shot in the Playoff, of course, I would think that’s awesome, fun, and good).

An Alabama, Clemson, and Notre Dame round robin. If you’d like to make it so Bama just gets the winner of Clemson vs. Notre Dame, that is also fine.

Four is an arbitrary number not guaranteed to fit all seasons. As Bill Connelly explained:

Back in 2013, after the announcement of the CFP’s formation, I went back through the BCS era and took a look at who would have made a hypothetical Playoff, breaking the field into “relatively obvious Playoff teams” and “contenders.” On average, I designated about 2.9 teams per year as “obvious” title teams.

(I’m totally fine with OU in the four-team field, though.)

Every college football fan, coach, and media member believes they’ve figured out THE perfect playoff plan, but by far the one I see most frequently advocated is a model in which each Power 5 champion gets a bid — a stipulation I’d add: unless a non-champ is in the top four — plus the top-ranked non-power.

This year, loosely based on the committee’s top 25, that’d give us:

No. 1 Alabama gets the winner of:
No. 4 Oklahoma vs. No. 5 Ohio State

No. 2 Clemson gets the winner of:
No. 3 Notre Dame vs. No. 6 UCF

If you want to force Notre Dame into a conference, sure. Take out Notre Dame and slide in Pac-12 champ Washington at No. 6.

Either way, I agree with this plan. We’d only end up adding two games to the season and thus some players’ workloads (maybe we offset that by adding a bye week in the regular season), actually reward the top seeds, and actually give all 130 teams in FBS plausible paths to national titles.

If you wanna add in another couple teams to make the top two bids play in the quarterfinals (meaning still very little reward for finishing No. 1), sure:

No. 1 Alabama vs. No. 8 Washington
No. 4 Oklahoma vs. No. 5 Georgia

No. 2 Clemson vs. No. 7 UCF
No. 3 Notre Dame vs. No. 6 Ohio State

Using a somewhat similar model to Division I’s actual best playoff — which gives each conference champ an autobid and seeds by committee rankings, though it groups the non-seeded teams more by geography than rankings — we’d have (I guesstimated how the committee might rank each team here that it didn’t rank IRL):

No. 1 Alabama gets the winner of:
West Virginia vs. Utah

No. 8 UCF gets the winner of:
Washington vs. NIU

No. 4 Oklahoma gets the winner of:
Washington State vs. Syracuse

No. 5 Georgia gets the winner of:
Penn State vs. Fresno State

No. 2 Clemson gets the winner of:
Texas vs. Mississippi State

No. 7 Michigan gets the winner of:
Florida vs. UAB

No. 3 Notre Dame gets the winner of:
Kentucky vs. Texas A&M

No. 6 Ohio State gets the winner of:
LSU vs. Appalachian State

If we could somehow make that work for players, maybe via a revenue share (talking crazy, I realize), I think everyone’s all in on that.

I dunno. We’ve already run into the issue of whether this is just too long a season for amateur athletes, but if there’s a way to make this all work for the players — say, by increasing their compensation and care in order to accommodate for the extra work — then sure.

And we’ll also have people arguing that it’ll demean the regular season, but we heard that argument about the BCS before the BCS started, and then we heard it from the BCS people until they started the Playoff. It’s not like the FCS regular season lacks drama, by the way.

They’ve been talking about doing that since a month before it began. It’ll expand as soon as ESPN and the FBS conferences agree it should expand. So the answer is yes.