The standings are in the books.  Now it’s time for the most interactive playoff in college football.  Welcome to the 9th annual Doug Franz College Football Playoff.

I’ve been giving you my version of a college football playoff since week 1 of the BCS standings.  Today is a different day, however, because YOUR vote will determine who  advances to the quarterfinals.

In this blog I’ve been very successful at destroying every point ever made by anyone in the anti-playoff crowd.  I’m fully aware that my playoff will never happen but even the match-ups get me excited.

Before you decide who gets out of the first round of the DFCFP, let me explain how it works.  More to the point, let me explain how Virginia Tech is in and three teams ranked ahead of Va Tech are not.

I like the BCS formula.  I think it’s an attack on anyone’s intelligence to use it to place only two teams into a championship game.  This year proves all of us BCS haters right again, as Texas and Oklahoma each have one loss and Texas was the one to beat Oklahoma.  If both teams lost the same amount of games and one of them lost head-to-head, how are we at this point?

I use the BCS formula to rank 120 teams.  I then rank all 11 conferences.  I want to reward those teams that won their conference.  However, I don’t think winning the Sunbelt should allow you to compete for a national championship.  I also don’t want FCS division teams flocking to begin new conferences at the FBS level just to be in the playoff.  My solution is a fixed number of teams (16) getting in the playoff with the automatic bids and the at-large bids evenly split.

I’ve taken the average rank of all the teams of each conference and then ranked the conferences.  Then I take the conference champion of the top eight conferences and advance them into the playoff.  The number listed next to each conference is the BCS average of the teams in that conference:

34

42

44.8

45.3

48

55

60

72

81

83

96

The standings are a huge wake-up call. The ACC’s champion is ranked 19th in the BCS. There are six conferences whose second place team ranks higher than Virginia Tech. That should mean the conference is a joke. Yet, if you rank a conference from the bottom up, the ACC is clearly number one. Duke is ranked 65th in the BCS. The mighty Big 12 has four teams ranked worse. The historically strong SEC actually has five teams ranked worse than Duke. Arizona was ranked 64th saving the Pac-10 from having 60% of its conference ranked worse than the last team in the ACC.

I love my system because it rewards your conference as a whole and makes your non-conference schedule vital to your chances to make the playoff.

The other eight spots are filled with at-large bids—which go to the top 8 teams in the BCS that didn’t win their conference championship. I then seed all 16 teams based on BCS ranking. The number next to each team is their seed for the playoff

Once you set up the seeds, it’s a complete shock to the system to look at the match ups. There are two repeats from the regular season. After all these years of the “World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party” being played in Jacksonville, the game moves to Gainesville. I’m also picking the upset in the other re-match. I don’t think Utah is beating TCU twice in the same year.

You have one week to study the match ups and vote on who advances. Use the honor system and vote only once because your vote counts but don’t make it count more than someone else’s vote. Since I don’t want to make fans drive around to neutral sites, the first two rounds are at the home of the higher seed. The last two games incorporate existing bowls.

16) Virginia Tech         @      1) Oklahoma

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15) Georgia                 @      2) Florida    

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14) Georgia Tech        @     3) Texas        

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13) Oklahoma State   @     4) Alabama     

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12) Cincinnati             @     5) USC           

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11) TCU                      @      6) Utah           

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10) Ohio State          @      7) Texas Tech

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9) Boise St.               @     8 ) Penn State 

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I’ll start the voting.  I’m taking two upsets:  TCU and Boise St.  I’ll take the home team in every other game.  Now it’s your turn. The polls are open for the next week and then we’ll take the results and move onto the quarterfinals.