Written By
Written By
The College Football Playoff is officially set, and love it or hate it, we have our 12 Teams competing for the National Championship.
And while the FCS Playoff Format has been floated around plenty of times, what if I were to tell you that the 24-Team Playoff isn't even the craziest bracket in all of college football?
That's right ladies and gentlemen, I'm talking about the Division III Football Playoff which is used to determine its national championship… which contains 40 Teams!
Which leads right into, if we were to somehow get to a 40 Team Playoff (which with all the talk on Playoff Expansion? Isn't completely out of the question at this point) what would that Playoff Field look like? And on top of that, who could hypothetically win the national championship out of this 40 Team Field?
Before I lay out the entire bracket, first thing that I want to do is lay out the framework of how that type of playoff bracket would even work in the context of the highest level of College Football plus also lay out how the selection show works for Division III which would affect how the initial matchups are formulated.
So with all that being said, let's move forward with how a 40 Team Playoff would even look like at the FBS Level as well as how the D3 Selection Committee typically operates.
In addition, the Division III Selection Committee also reserves the right to adjust the initial matchups based on how far teams would have to travel in order to play the game as well as avoiding matchups that pit two teams from the same conference against each other. The full explanation of how the D3 Playoff Process works can be found here: https://www.d3football.com/interactive/faq/playoffs
Finally, in order for me to determine who would make this 40-Team Playoff Field, what I did was not only look at the final CFP Rankings that came out over the course of Sunday, but I also looked at who are the highest ranked teams from the AP Poll in order to determine the remaining teams who would make the 40-Team Field, since the CFP Committee only ranked the Top 25 Teams.
So after all the research was done in terms of the D3 Selection Criteria as well as looking at the most recent CFP Committee AND AP Poll Rankings, here's how the first couple of rounds would shake out:
Note: *Indicates that this Team made it in as a Conference Champion.
The immediate takeaway for me when putting this bracket together is that while the Power Conferences would garner a lion's share of the Playoff Bids, that doesn't mean that the Group of Five Conferences couldn't get multiple teams from its conferences too. For example, while the Sun Belt, C-USA, and MAC were all 1 Bid Leagues, the American was actually able to get 4 Teams in while the Mountain West wasn't too far behind getting 3 Teams into this version of the CFP!
As for how the Power Conferences played out, the SEC would still lead every conference in the country being able to get 9 Teams into the Playoff (all of whom would be hosting a Playoff Game in either the 1st or 2nd Round) but the other conferences wouldn't be too far behind. The Big Ten would stand alone in second place with 7 Bids for the conference with both the Big 12 and ACC both receiving 6 bids apiece. Two Independent Teams (Notre Dame and UConn) were also able to make the field as At-Large Teams as well.
Now the fun part in all of this is… who would actually be able to make noise in this 40-Team Field? And you happen to be in luck because I have you covered there too. Thanks to websites like the computer model for College Football Nerds, we can actually get a rough idea of how these games would play out based on each team's entire body of work.
So let's dive in terms of projecting every playoff game that would be decided in this hypothetical Playoff Field.
(2) Ohio State – 26
(4) Texas Tech – 17
So there it is, in a hypothetical world where there would be a 40 Team Playoff within the FBS Level, Ohio State would still come out on top to win the national championship!
