In which BracketCat FINALLY relaunches his long-dormant Protest Playoff project. Rejoice, peons, for his namesake Brackets hath risen again!
Sixteen years.
Sixteen teams.
It’s time to go back down the rabbit hole to Wonderland with your resident Mad Hatter.
What Is the Protest Playoff?
A long time ago, in January 2009, I wrote my very first post on this blog. (And it’s still there!)
The whole reason my user name is “BracketCat” is because of this project. It’s why they recruited me. Granted, none of those people are still around these parts, but I linger on.
First off, credit to our dear leader Jon. He has been putting up with my saying for literal years that I was going to revisit this idea, or heck, that I was just going to post more in general. Incredible patience, sir, has finally paid off.
So what changed?
Well, let’s just say I’ve rapidly grown tired of all the incessant media coverage, the stupid social media graphics, and the bad math by various pundits on what “would have happened” under various 16-team playoff models.
So, like Thanos, I’m going to do it myself.
And unlike some of these chuckleheads who’ve crawled out of the woodwork this past week… I’M GOING TO SHOW MY MATH. So feel free to fact-check me in the comments!
Rules of Engagement
So here’s how this series will work. For the foreseeable future, I’m going to engage in a little bit of alternate history and wish fulfillment by creating a 16-team playoff for every year, starting with 2024 and working backward through time.
If I stay on target, I will finish the CFP era (2014-2024) one week before Farm O’Geddon on August 23. We’ll see how it goes from there as the 2025 football season gets under way.
(Keep in mind, I’ve already simulated 1998-2008 — all I need to do is update the seedings. But I plan to revisit each of those years, as well as simulate 2009-2013, throughout the fall.)
I eventually would like to travel back to the pre-BCS era (my dream is to seed a field for the wild 1971 season, the Big 8’s high-water mark), but it will take more time and effort, and very well may not occur until 2026, after the football season has come to an end. We shall see…
As before, I will seed conference champion automatic qualifiers and at-large teams with the help of CFP/BCS rankings, simulating the results, and possibly writing up game summaries for your time-wasting enjoyment.
As an added bonus (since this is sort of the impetus for the entire exercise), I will show what both the 5+11 and 4-4-2-2-1-3 models would look like for each year — as well as the BCS 2-team matchup, the 4-team CFP field, and even a hypothetical 8-team playoff that we never received (or really even discussed), plus whatever other kooky models these conference administrators cook up and “socialize” in 2025. But I will only simulate the 5+11 model.
Maybe K-State will even win some of these hypothetical playoffs, allowing us to experience a little bit of catharsis even as that elusive final prize seems further away from us than ever.
2024: What Could Have Happened…
Tomorrow at noon I will post the various fields for 2024. The schedule for each week will be as follows:
- SUNDAY: Fields announced
- MONDAY: Left side of the bracket first-round games played (higher seed hosts)
- TUESDAY: Right side of the bracket first-round games played (higher seed hosts)
- WEDNESDAY: Second-round games played (bowl sites)
- THURSDAY: Final Four (bowl sites)
- FRIDAY: National Championship
- SATURDAY: Everyone needs a break — go and watch an old football game until summer is over, in which case go watch the real 2025 football games instead (but I may also post a data and analysis wrap-up post like I did back in 2009; we shall see…)