I asked ChatGPT to create this for me in keeping with the zeitgeist of making college football as shitty as possible.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we choose college football playoff teams, and honestly, we’re overdue for a smarter, fairer, more transparent system. Here’s my pitch: use AI to process end-of-season data and run massive simulations in which every team plays every other team thousands of times under varied conditions. Then select playoff teams based on the statistically strongest performers across those simulated matchups.
Why is this better?
1. It removes human bias.
Committee members—no matter how qualified—are still human. They carry regional preferences, conference assumptions, and subconscious leanings. With large-scale simulations, teams are evaluated solely on measurable performance. No human bias or controversy—just data.
2. It’s far more comprehensive than polls or committee debates.
Right now, we use a small sample of actual games to infer who’s best. But football schedules are uneven, conferences vary dramatically, and season-long narratives often overshadow the numbers. Simulations allow us to explore every hypothetical matchup, not just the handful that happened in real life.
3. It gives us probabilistic truth, not guesswork.
Instead of “eye tests” and résumé comparisons, we’d know how often a team would beat each of its contenders across thousands of scenarios. That makes playoff selection not only more accurate, but more defendable.
4. It makes strength of schedule and injuries more realistic.
Simulations can weight for missing players, venue effects, weather, and late-season improvement. The result: a nuanced picture of a team’s true quality—something that the current system struggles to capture.
5. Transparency becomes a feature, not a problem.
Publish the simulation model, publish the inputs, publish the results. Fans can argue about model parameters, sure—but at least the process is consistent and openly documented.
We already use analytics and machine learning in recruiting, game planning, and sports betting. It’s time the playoff selection process caught up. Let the games be decided on the field—but let simulation-backed evidence decide who reaches that field.
I know it’s unconventional, but so was expanding the playoff—and look how that turned out.
Curious what others think: is it time to take the biggest decision in college football out of the committee room and into the data lab?