College Football Madness: Florida State, Auburn, Alabama and Michigan State are the top seeds
Welcome to Dr. Saturday's College Football Madness. Ever wondered how the 2013 college football season could have turned out with a 68-team playoff? You've come to the right spot. While 68 teams participate in the NCAA tournament, we're running an expanded college football playoff. And you're in charge. Each matchup is open to a vote and the team with the most votes in each game moves on to the next round. Here's the bracket.
Our top four seeds are no surprise.
We went with the final BCS standings for our four No. 1 seeds, which gave us Florida State, Auburn, Alabama and Michigan State. For our seeding, we went with the pre-bowl resumes of all 64 FBS teams, because this is a playoff. In our perfect hypothetical College Football Madness world, this is replacing the bowl system. Bowl results are irrelevant.
For the rest of the seeds, especially the top four, we used an "S" curve similar to what the NCAA tournament committee uses. Record and strength of schedule were of course factored in. And we made sure to attempt to guarantee no teams from the same conference would play each other any earlier than the Elite Eight.
Which region looks the toughest to you? We think all four are pretty even, but Region 2 looks like it could be the toughest with Central Florida as a No. 4, Wisconsin as a No. 5 and USC as a No. 7. If we're going to guess which group is the weakest, it'd be Region 1, but it's no cakewalk for Florida State. A potential matchup with either UCLA or LSU in the Sweet 16 isn't easy.
The spiciest Elite Eight matchup would be Stanford and Michigan State a rematch of the Rose Bowl that the Spartans won. We'd all like to see that again, right? Alabama and Baylor are right behind too. Think of how much more pace-of-play debate we can have?
Thursday and Friday we'll open up two regions each for voting. You'll get to choose the winners of all 32 first round games and we'll begin the second round on Monday and Tuesday.
Will the seeds hold and we'll have a Final Four similar to what we would see if the College Football Playoff was in effect this year? Or will a team have a run like George Mason did in 2006? And did the committee do a good job seeding the teams? Let us know in the comments below, and now is your chance to help determine a national champion.
[NCAA tournament: Check out the full bracket | The Dagger blog | Buy team gear]
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is the assistant editor of Dr. Saturday on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @NickBromberg
