PROTEST PLAYOFF 2019: Selection Sunday - Kansas City Sports Today

#9 Joe Burrow — The face of the 2019 football season was Joe Cool. | Photo by Gus Stark/LSU/University Images via Getty Images

In which BracketCat selects and seeds the 16-team field for the 2019 season, as well as examining a variety of alternate playoff field possibilities using the same pool of teams.

Welcome to the sixth Selection Sunday of the new Protest Playoff!

For this first section of playoff recreations (2014-2024), this will be pretty easy. We have the committee’s final CFP rankings for each year and can seed off those, along with champions.

In case you’ve already forgotten, the final CFP rankings for the 2019 season (which was the 150th season of college football!) were (conference champions designated by asterisks):

LSU* (13-0)
Ohio State* (13-0)
Clemson* (13-0)
Oklahoma* (12-1)
Georgia (11-2)
Oregon* (11-2)
Baylor (11-2)
Wisconsin (10-3)
Florida (10-2)
Penn State (10-2)
Utah (11-2)
Auburn (9-3)
Alabama (10-2)
Michigan (9-3)
Notre Dame (10-2)
Iowa (9-3)
Memphis* (12-1)
Minnesota (10-2)
Boise State* (12-1)
Appalachian State* (12-1)
Cincinnati (10-3)
USC (8-4)
Navy (9-2)
Virginia (9-4)
Oklahoma State (8-4)

Other teams who made appearances in the CFP rankings in November and/or December, but could not stay in the final set, included Iowa State (7-6), Kansas State (8-5), SMU (10-3), Texas (8-5), Virginia Tech (8-5) and Wake Forest (8-5).

Our Actual Field: 16 Teams, 5+11 Model

Under this model, the five* highest ranked conference champions — LSU (SEC), Ohio State (Big Ten), Clemson (ACC), Oklahoma (Big 12) and Oregon (Pac-12) — all would receive automatic bids, even though only four of them made the actual four-team playoff.

But seeding and byes are not tied to championship status, a decision that matches the one already reached for the 2025 12-team playoff after just one year of a flawed seeding process almost no one (outside of the ACC, Big 12 or Mountain West conferences) liked very much.

The remaining 11 teams* are drawn from the highest-ranked remaining schools in the committee’s final playoff rankings, yielding the following list of national seeds for PP 2019:

LSU
Ohio State
Clemson
Oklahoma
Georgia
Oregon
Baylor
Wisconsin
Florida
Penn State
Utah
Auburn
Alabama
Michigan
Notre Dame
Memphis

Unlike in 2024, 2022, 2021 and 2020, our field does not continue to match the top 16 teams, like what happened in 2023.

Specifically, No. 16 Iowa is left out in favor of Memphis, a 12-1 G5 conference champion to which I am awarding a bid under the protocols outlined below*. Iowa can cry about it, but when you’re a persistently mediocre Big Ten team, 9-3 just isn’t a good enough resume.

(Especially when Memphis barely edged two other 12-1 champions, Boise State and Appalachian State!)

Other than the aforementioned one-loss champions in the lower end of the CFP rankings, nobody left out had fewer than two losses, and those were Minnesota and Navy. Seems OK!

It is worth noting here the greatest deviation between this model and the one I used in my 2009 series of posts: I included all 10 conference champions and only had six remaining at-large teams. While this is the more egalitarian model in terms of widening national participation across multiple levels of FBS, it is entirely unrealistic — even more so now that the P4 (and especially the B1G and SEC) continue to pull away financially.

However, for those who care, under that model Appalachian State (Sun Belt), Boise State (MWC), Florida Atlantic (C-USA) and Miami (Ohio) (MAC) would replace Auburn, Alabama, Michigan and Notre Dame. Bet Greg Sankey and the blue blood brigade would’ve loved it!

(*For those of you wondering why the Group of 5 does not have an “automatic” bid, remember: You are conflating their highest-ranked conference champion, part of the five mentioned above, with their “non-power” status. This occurred following the dissolution of the Pac-12. Prior to that, the model under discussion for a 12-team playoff was a 6+6 model, and I am going to proceed under the assumption that this would occur in a 16-team Power 5 field as well. But this is not technically written into the 12- or 16-team rules as they stand.)

Alternate Field: 16 Teams, Conference Auto-Bid Model

If the Big Ten’s preferred plan were applied instead, these would be your 16 teams (those in bold received the conference or G5 auto-bids; the rest are at-large selections):

LSU (SEC)
Ohio State (B1G)
Clemson (ACC)
Oklahoma (Big 12)
Georgia (SEC)
Oregon
Baylor (Big 12)
Wisconsin (B1G)
Florida (SEC)
Penn State (B1G)
Utah
Auburn (SEC)
Alabama
Michigan (B1G)
Memphis (G5)
Virginia (ACC)

It’s hard to speculate how this would have worked with a functional Pac-12, so I just left them in an at-large category instead of having to figure out any new conference quotas.

I admit to a small chuckle at the notion of Notre Dame being squeezed out by a mediocre ACC partner in Virginia due to the quotas — reminder: the ACC does not historically deserve two teams in every playoff! — but it clearly produces an inferior 16-team field.

Under 2024 alignments, the Big 12, Big Ten and SEC each would have an additional at-large team in the field under this 4-4-2-2-1-3 model. This is increasingly mounting evidence that the ACC doesn’t deserve additional consideration and the Big 12 historically probably does.

Of course, this all presumes the biggest conferences would still play traditional championship games that produce rankings such as these; the plan, as we know, is to not.

Alternate Model: 12 Teams, Straight Seeding

If the model scheduled to be used this fall (2025) were applied back to previous years, it would net the following 12-team field for the season under discussion (auto-bids in bold):

LSU
Ohio State
Clemson
Oklahoma
Georgia
Oregon
Baylor
Wisconsin
Florida
Penn State
Utah
Memphis

So basically it’s 11 of the 12 New Year’s Six participants (No. 24 Virginia would not receive an automatic bid under this model, but did receive one to the real Orange Bowl), only instead the first-round matchups would be Memphis @ Georgia (winner meets Oklahoma in a bowl game), Utah @ Oregon (winner gets Clemson), Penn State @ Baylor (winner faces Ohio State) and Florida @ Wisconsin.

Alternate Model: 12 Teams, Original Seeding

Alternatively, you could field a 12-team field using the old seeding model used only in 2024:

LSU
Ohio State
Clemson
Oklahoma
Georgia
Oregon
Baylor
Wisconsin
Florida
Penn State
Utah
Memphis

As you can see, this would produce the exact same first-round matchups as the other seeding model. This is due to what a top-heavy year 2019 was with multiple undefeateds.

Alternate Model: Eight Teams

For the sake of this exercise, I am going to assume the four major conferences would receive conference champion auto-bids and the other four teams would be selected at large. I think with only eight spots, the G5 would have a hard sell on getting an auto-bid.

(This is one of the reasons we jumped straight from four to 12, in fact — to avoid antitrust.)

I’m also going to presume under this model that champions would get to host, but since the first-round games likely would be played in bowl environments, that simply decides who gets to wear which jersey and possibly who gets which bowl (higher seeds closer to home):

LSU
Ohio State
Clemson
Oklahoma
Georgia
Oregon
Baylor
Wisconsin

This is actually one of the best fields I have seen produced by this model. Very top loaded!

Alternate Field: The CFP Four

LSU
Ohio State
Clemson
Oklahoma

Well, we know how this turned out. This CFP Playoff was both extremely entertaining and it featured the four surviving Power 4 conferences with teams that went a total of 51-1!

(And who delivered that lone loss to the top 4 teams? Yes, Chris Klieman’s K-State Wildcats.)

Alternate Field: The Good Ol’ BCS

The BCS would have produced an LSU vs. Ohio State matchup that, while perhaps interesting, completely discounts Clemson beating Ohio State on a neutral field. It does, however, spare Oklahoma the embarrassment of the loss it suffered at Joe Burrow’s hands.

If you really want to go down this rabbit hole, the BCS Know How project has continued to project on X/Twitter what the original BCS standings would have looked like since 2013.

2019: What Really Happened

In short, Joe Burrow, Ed Orgeron, Joe Brady and Dave Aranda is what happened.

As we all know, SEC champion LSU started the fifth-to-last four-team playoff as a No. 1 seed and was able to complete the mission, winning Orgeron’s only title (and LSU’s last to date).

LSU easily dispatched No. 3 seed Clemson in a lopsided championship after absolutely immolating No. 4 seed Oklahoma in the Peach Bowl.

Clemson previously advanced by dispatching No. 2 seed Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl.

Georgia, the first team “left out,” proceeded to make its case for inclusion by beating No. 7 Baylor in the Sugar Bowl and sending Matt Rhule off to Nebraska by way of the NFL route.

In the Rose Bowl, No. 6 Oregon barely escaped No. 8 Wisconsin in a 28-27 all-time thriller.

The Orange Bowl featured a matchup between No. 9 Florida and No. 24 Virginia, with the Gators winning a 36-28 game that really wasn’t even that close (UVA scored 14 in the 4th).

The least defensive New Year’s Six game of 2019 was the Cotton Bowl, matching a Big Ten also-ran, Penn State, against the best rated of the three 12-1 Group of 5 teams, Memphis.

Among our other hypothetical playoff participants, these were the real-world finishes:

Utah lost the Alamo Bowl to Texas, 38-10, continuing a proud Utah tradition of losing bowls.
Auburn lost to Minnesota, 31-24, in a fairly mundane version of the Outback Bowl.
Alabama beat Michigan 35-16 in a blueblood-splattered Citrus Bowl.
Notre Dame dominated the Big 12’s Iowa State, 33-9, in the Camping World Bowl.

Honestly, when you see these results, I’m not really sure that any of these five teams had a strong case to justify inclusion in this particular playoff, but somebody had to make it in over a fairly undeserving Iowa team. I’ll be interested to see if this is the year a team seeded 14th through 16th finally wins a game in either a hypothetical or true future playoff…

Wikipedia’s 2019 season summary

Tomorrow’s Games

To make these posts more fun and interactive, please vote for who you think would win each matchup! I can’t promise to take the votes into account because of the simulation process I use, but it will be interesting to see and discuss the results, plus they may serve as a sort of a tiebreaker if I end up needing one.

BracketCat’s Protest Playoff Archives