Whatifsports has updated their rosters for the 2010 NCAA season, and I have taken it upon myself to start the simulation to try to find the Victoria Times national champion.
For those that don’t remember, this is the annual reminder post. The whole idea for this came from a conversation Steve and I had several years ago. Many people feel that a playoff is the right way to determine a national champion, but the playoff solution was still flawed. Teams elected were still based on the inherently biased polls, some of the teams wouldn’t even win their conference and would still be added to hypothetical tournament brackets. For all the “winning it on the field” talk, the tournaments would still be largely based on the opinions of old people.
The idea of a tournament that would take the conference champions was lobbed around in our conversation. For the short term, that would be fine, but there would still be talk of the disparity in large and small conferences. To balance them out, we redistributed the teams into geographic conferences, rather than ones b based on money. Were there some conferences that end up weaker than others? Of course, but in the end, there weren’t any top to bottom Sun Belt to SEC type of disparities. There are 120 NCAA teams, and we have created 12, 10 team conferences, as seen below.
For seeding purposes, we also have a preordained non conference schedule based on 4 conference groupings wherein the schedule is based on the previous year’s order of finish. The groupings, or “pods” are rearranged every two years based on the strength of the conferences.
And I know what you are saying. 12 teams? But how is that going to work? The same way the NFL does. There will be 4 teams with a first round bye and 8 that play in the first round. Nobody seems to have issues with the NFL. Games will be played at the 12 oldest bowl sites (not that it REALLY matters in a simulation) and the national title rotates from conference to conference every year. This year, the hypothetical championship would be in Washington DC.
So we are in our 4th year, and Steve and I each run our own version of the sim. Our entire NCAA format is peeling off in wildly different directions, and we almost always end up with different tournament fields and different champions. It’s an interesting exercise, if nothing else.
The last thing I wanted to mention was how we do the simulation. We go game by game, using whatifsports.com, which does their own thorough college football tournament simulation, featuring 16 of the top teams across the country. If you follow us on twitter @victoriawxtimes I have been posting updates. I am through the second week, and right now Stanford looks like the top team. Should be fun!
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