PROTEST PLAYOFF 2020: Selection Sunday - Kansas City Sports Today

2022 CFP National Championship - Georgia v Alabama - Preview — The 2020 season and playoff field can be summed up in two simple words: COVID. Stupidity. | Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

In which BracketCat selects and seeds the 16-team field for the 2020 season, as well as examining a variety of alternate playoff field possibilities using the same pool of teams.

Welcome to the fifth 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.

Admittedly, I was somewhat hesitant to do this particular simulation since, as we all know, the 2020 season was an insane, upside-down, COVID-riddled, Mickey Mouse hot mess from which few (if any) lasting conclusions can be drawn. The last four seasons have proven this.

Everything about this season comes with a damn asterisk, including player eligibility. But since they did actually play a 4-team CFP in 2020, and Alabama actually did hoist a national championship trophy that officially counts in the record books, I decided to proceed.

In case you’ve already forgotten, the final CFP rankings for the 2020 season were (conference champions designated by asterisks):

Alabama* (11-0)
Clemson* (10-1)
Ohio State* (6-0)
Notre Dame (10-1)
Texas A&M (8-1)
Oklahoma* (8-2)
Florida (8-3)
Cincinnati* (9-0)
Georgia (7-2)
Iowa State (8-3)
Indiana (6-1)
Coastal Carolina** (11-0)
North Carolina (8-3)
Northwestern (6-2)
Iowa (6-2)
BYU (10-1)
USC (5-1)
Miami (8-2)
Louisiana** (9-1)
Texas (6-3)
Oklahoma State (7-3)
San Jose State* (7-0)
NC State (8-3)
Tulsa (6-2)
Oregon* (4-2)

**Because the 2020 Sun Belt Conference championship game was canceled, designated host Coastal Carolina and road challenger Louisiana were declared co-champions instead.

Other teams who made appearances in the CFP rankings in November and/or December, but could not stay in the final set, included Auburn (6-5), Colorado (4-2), Marshall (7-3), Missouri (5-5), Washington (3-1) and Wisconsin (4-3). (Oh, man, these records… LOL!)

Our Actual Field: 16 Teams, 5+11 Model

Under this model, the five* highest ranked conference champions — Alabama (SEC), Clemson (ACC), Ohio State (Big Ten), Oklahoma (Big 12) and Cincinnati (AAC) — all would receive automatic bids, even though only three 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 2020:

Alabama
Clemson
Ohio State
Notre Dame
Texas A&M
Oklahoma
Florida
Cincinnati
Georgia
Iowa State
Indiana
Coastal Carolina
North Carolina
Northwestern
Iowa
BYU

Unlike in 2023, our field does match the top 16 teams, as it did in 2024, 2022 and 2021.

It’s also interesting that two independents again made the field (BYU and Notre Dame), but since Notre Dame technically played this season as a full ACC member, it doesn’t count.

Other than a pair of zero- or one-loss mid-majors toward the lower end of the CFP rankings, nobody left out had fewer than two losses, besides 5-1 USC. I can absolutely live with that.

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 Ball State (MAC), Oregon (Pac-12), San Jose State (MWC), and UAB (C-USA) would replace North Carolina, Northwestern, Iowa and BYU.

(Cincinnati still makes it in as the AAC champion under any 4-plus-team model, and I awarded Coastal Carolina the sixth* bid since it finished with a higher CFP ranking than No. 19 Louisiana and went 8-0 in Sun Belt Conference play, whilst the Ragin’ Cajuns went 7-1 and likely would have lost the championship game as the road team in Conway anyway).

(*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):

Alabama (SEC)
Clemson (ACC)
Ohio State (B1G)
Notre Dame (ACC)
Texas A&M (SEC)
Oklahoma (Big 12)
Florida (SEC)
Cincinnati (G5)
Georgia (SEC)
Iowa State (Big 12)
Indiana (B1G)
Coastal Carolina
North Carolina
Northwestern (B1G)
Iowa (B1G)
BYU

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.

For the first time, the stupid P2/A4 quotas produced the exact same field of 16 as the 5+11 model. Got to give it to the Big Ten — their dumb model actually works during a pandemic!

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):

Alabama
Clemson
Ohio State
Notre Dame
Texas A&M
Oklahoma
Florida
Cincinnati
Georgia
Iowa State
Indiana
Coastal Carolina

So basically it’s 11 of the 12 New Year’s Six participants (No. 25 Oregon would not receive an automatic bid under this model, but did receive one to the real Rose Bowl), only instead the first-round matchups would be Coastal Carolina @ Texas A&M (winner meets Notre Dame in a bowl game), Indiana @ Oklahoma (winner gets Ohio State), Iowa State @ Florida (winner faces Clemson) and Georgia @ Cincinnati (can you imagine the SEC screaming at this?!).

Alternate Model: 12 Teams, Original Seeding

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

Alabama
Clemson
Ohio State
Oklahoma
Notre Dame
Texas A&M
Florida
Cincinnati
Georgia
Iowa State
Indiana
Coastal Carolina

As you can see, this would produce first-round matchups of Coastal Carolina @ Notre Dame (winner moves on to face Oklahoma in a bowl game), Indiana @ Texas A&M (winner gets Ohio State), Iowa State @ Florida (winner still faces Clemson) and still Georgia @ Cincinnati.

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):

Alabama
Clemson
Ohio State
Oklahoma
Notre Dame
Texas A&M
Florida
Cincinnati

This is actually one of the better fields I have seen produced by this model. It still sucks most of the time, though. Oklahoma didn’t deserve a “home” site over Notre Dame, ever.

Alternate Field: The CFP Four

Alabama
Clemson
Ohio State
Notre Dame

Well, we know how this turned out. While this CFP Playoff was moderately entertaining, it still featured just three conferences thanks to Notre Dame’s temporary ACC affiliation.

Alternate Field: The Good Ol’ BCS

The BCS would have produced an Alabama vs. Clemson matchup that, while perhaps interesting, completely discounts Ohio State destroying Clemson on a neutral field. It also leaves out a deserving Notre Dame team that beat Clemson during the regular season.

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.

2020: What Really Happened

Well, for starters, the true champ of this season was a nasty little bug from Wuhan, China.

As we all know, SEC champion Alabama started the fourth-to-last four-team playoff as a No. 1 seed and was able to complete the mission, winning Nick Saban’s sixth and final title.

Alabama easily dispatched No. 3 seed Ohio State in a lopsided championship after outlasting No. 4 seed Notre Dame in the only Rose Bowl ever to be played in Texas.

Ohio State previously advanced by dominating No. 2 seed Clemson in the Sugar Bowl.

Texas A&M, the first team “left out,” proceeded to make its case for inclusion by dominating North Carolina in the Orange Bowl and producing Jimbo Fisher’s only good season there.

In the Cotton Bowl, No. 6 Oklahoma dominated No. 7 Florida by a surprising score of 55-20.

The Peach Bowl featured a fun matchup between Cincinnati and Georgia, with the Bulldogs winning a 24-21 game thanks only to a historic fourth-quarter comeback. (But but but, SEC!)

The lamest non-playoff New Year’s Six game of 2020 was the Fiesta Bowl, matching a fluky Big 12 runner-up, Iowa State, against the pathetic 4-2 upset winner of the Pac-12, Oregon.

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

Indiana lost a weak Outback Bowl to Ole Miss, 26-20, its last taste of success until 2024.
Coastal Carolina lost to Liberty, 37-34, in a wild and high-scoring overtime Cure Bowl.
Northwestern beat Auburn and its interim coach, Kevin Steele, 35-19 in the Citrus Bowl.
Iowa was set to play Missouri in the Music City Bowl, which was canceled due to COVID-19.
BYU dominated future Big 12 Conference opponent UCF 49-23 in the Boca Raton 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 very undeserving Oregon 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 2020 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