PROTEST PLAYOFF 2023: Selection Sunday - Kansas City Sports Today

#18 Tate Rodemaker — Finally, justice for Tate Rodemaker and the rest of his historically maligned teammates! With the advent of a 16-team playoff, we can right the wrongs of the 2023 committee and invite them in. | Alicia Devine/Tallahassee Democrat / USA TODAY NETWORK

In which BracketCat selects and seeds the 16-team field for the 2023 season, as well as examining a variety of alternate playoff field possibilities using the same pool of teams.

Welcome to the second 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 2024 season were (conference champions designated by asterisks):

Michigan* (13-0)
Washington* (13-0)
Texas* (12-1)
Alabama* (12-1)
Florida State* (13-0)
Georgia (12-1)
Ohio State (11-1)
Oregon (11-2)
Missouri (10-2)
Penn State (10-2)
Ole Miss (10-2)
Oklahoma (10-2)
LSU (9-3)
Arizona (9-3)
Louisville (10-3)
Notre Dame (9-3)
Iowa (10-3)
NC State (9-3)
Oregon State (8-4)
Oklahoma State (8-4)
Tennessee (8-4)
Clemson (8-4)
Liberty* (13-0)
SMU* (11-2)
Kansas 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 Air Force (9-4), Kansas (9-4), North Carolina (8-5), Tulane (11-3), UCLA (8-5), USC (8-5) and Utah (8-5).

Our Actual Field: 16 Teams, 5+11 Model

Under this model, the five* highest ranked conference champions — Michigan (Big Ten), Washington (Pac-12), Texas (Big 12), Alabama (SEC), and Florida State (ACC) — all would receive automatic bids, just as four of them did in actuality (and one notoriously did not).

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 2023:

Michigan
Washington
Texas
Alabama
Florida State
Georgia
Ohio State
Oregon
Missouri
Penn State
Ole Miss
Oklahoma
LSU
Arizona
Louisville
Liberty

As I predicted, our field does not continue to match the top 16 teams like it did in 2024. Specifically, No. 16 Notre Dame is left out in favor of Liberty, an undefeated G5 conference champion to which I am awarding a bid under the protocols outlined below*. Notre Dame can cry about it, but when you’re an independent, 9-3 just isn’t a good enough resume.

(Big Ten runner-up Iowa and 9-3 NC State probably have a better case to complain anyway!)

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 Boise State (MWC), Miami of Ohio (MAC), SMU (AAC), and Troy (Sun Belt) would replace Arizona, Louisville, LSU and Oklahoma.

(*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 Autobid 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 autobids; the rest are at-large selections):

Michigan (B1G)
Washington
Texas (Big 12)
Alabama (SEC)
Florida State (ACC)
Georgia (SEC)
Ohio State (B1G)
Oregon
Missouri (SEC)
Penn State (B1G)
Ole Miss (SEC)
Oklahoma (Big 12)
LSU
Arizona
Louisville (ACC)
Iowa (B1G)

Under this model, Notre Dame is squeezed out by Iowa instead of Liberty. (You can see why the Big Ten likes this proposal…) The Big 12 gets two (traitor) teams in either way, as does the 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.

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: Eight Teams

For the sake of this exercise, I am going to assume the four major conferences would receive conference champion autobids 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 autobid.

(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):

Michigan
Texas
Alabama
Florida State
Washington
Georgia
Ohio State
Oregon

Yeah, this one sucks for oh, so many reasons. Either undefeated Florida State gets sent on the road or they jump into a home status and Washington unfairly has to fall instead. Blech!

Alternate Field: The CFP Four

Michigan
Washington
Texas
Alabama

Well, we know how this turned out. While this CFP Playoff was entertaining in its own right, it will always be poisoned by what the committee did to Florida State and for the SEC. It was a foreshadowing of things to come. 2023 will be the perfect test case for playoff expansion.

Alternate Field: The Good Ol’ BCS

The BCS would have produced the Michigan vs. Washington matchup that we got anyway.

Perhaps it’s more efficient, but it’s not more fair and we would have missed some terrific games along the way, like that Texas-Washington shootout or the Alabama beating.

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.

2023: What Really Happened

As we all know, champ Michigan started the last-ever four-team playoff as a 1 seed and finally broke through to win it all (likely with help from cheating) and avenge the TCU loss.

They did it by going through No. 4 seed Alabama (in the Rose Bowl) and No. 2 seed Washington, which had previously outlasted No. 3 seed Texas in the exciting Sugar Bowl.

The criminally victimized Florida State, upon having its heart ripped out of its chest, saw much of its two-deep opt out to prepare for the 2024 NFL Draft and subsequently was steamrolled by Georgia, 63-3, in the Orange Bowl.

The Cotton Bowl featured Ohio State, a team similarly beset by early departures, losing 14-3 to Missouri, a misleading result that certainly fueled SEC superiority by an additional 300%.

In the Fiesta Bowl, Oregon thoroughly dismantled and humbled Liberty by a score of 45-6.

Ole Miss won a rather forgettable Peach Bowl over Penn State by a score of 38-25.

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

Arizona completely took it to Oklahoma, forcing six turnovers and capping a 10-3 season with a 38-24 Alamo Bowl win that drop-kicked the Sooners into SEC irrelevancy forever and handed the Wildcats their Big 12 lunch money… and then their coach left for Washington.
Louisville lost to an underwhelming 7-5 USC team, 42-28, in the Holiday Bowl.
LSU outlasted Wisconsin 35-31 in the ReliaQuest Bowl, extending a series of SEC-over-Big Ten bowl victories in this particular postseason. (But the SEC didn’t win the biggest prize!)

Wikipedia’s 2023 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