With the announcement of a proposed (not yet accepted) 12-Team Bracket, I decided I'd take a stab at recreating what those brackets would have looked like for the existing years of the CFP (2014-2020).
The proposal as reported by ESPN has the following rules for selection:
Without further ado, here are your playoff brackets:
The proposal as reported by ESPN has the following rules for selection:
- The 6 highest-ranked Conference Champions get in, regardless of which conference they play in. This is hard to conceive that the Power 5 Champs wouldn't be shoo-ins for 5 of the 6 spots, but technically, you could have champs from G5 Conferences ranked higher.
- The remaining 6 teams are at-large. No limit on how many teams can come from one conference.
- The Top 4 Conference Champs get a First Round BYE in the bracket.
- Teams 5-12 play at the home site of the higher-seeded team.
- The quarter-finals and semi-finals will be played at the six "BCS" Bowls (Fiesta, Sugar, Cotton, Orange, Peach and Rose). I did not go so far as to project which teams would play in which bowls. My hunch is that the two semi-final bowls will rotate and the four quarter-final bowls may get assigned with some degree of history or geography. If you have a USC-Michigan match up as a quarter-final and the Rose Bowl is available, I don't know why that's not the game played at that site.
- Notre Dame cannot be ranked higher than #5. This is because, as an independent, they do not have a conference to become champion of. Note that on two occasions, Notre Dame would have been ranked high enough to earn a Top 4 seeding, but this rule drops them to the #5 seed immediately. I guess the penalty for not playing in a Conference Championship Game is that you have to jump right into a first round CFP game without the benefit of a week off. This is not a rule I would have thought they'd propose, but Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick was one of the four committee members charged with making this presentation to the wider committee, so I'm guessing he either agreed to it or got put in line rather quickly.
Without further ado, here are your playoff brackets:
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