Getting started

It is said on numerous occasions throughout the college football season.

"Every week is the playoffs!"

That's usually the commentators or studio hosts trying to justify why one of America's biggest sports still doesn't have a fair and complete way of determining a national champion. Even in this era of the BCS National Championship game, we still have situations where the No. 3 ranked team cries foul - or worse - we end up with split national champions like we did with USC and LSU in 2003.

So, yes, I would like a playoff system. You would like a playoff system. Paris Hilton would like a playoff system. My son Wilfredo would like a playoff system - and he's a 7-year-old Filipino living with his stripper-turned-hair stylist mother in Manila. Don't ask.

But the cold, hard fact appears to be that we're not getting one anytime soon. So in lieu of that, we will treat every week like a playoff, and that the season is one big tournament, just like Rece Davis wants us to do.

The first thing we need to figure out is how you get eliminated from this tournament. That's pretty easy. College football never had a legit two-loss champion until LSU turned the trick last year. With the addition of the 12th game for all teams, and a 13th for some of the conferences with championship games, this could be a trend that continues.

That means if you lose three games, you're out. No less than 34 teams have already reached three losses. Of course, a lot more than that are out because a school from a non-BCS conference with two losses would never play for the national championship. It's a pretty good bet they wouldn't even make it with one in the current format, but for the purposes of this exercise, we will only eliminate the two-loss non-BCS schools. That's another 18 schools out.

So with those 52 schools out, that leaves us with 67 still in play as of this writing on 10/1/08. We'll get to them in a future post, first here are the 34 teams with three losses and the additional 18 teams with two losses from non-BCS conferences.

THREE OR MORE LOSSES (34)
UCLA, Tennessee, North Carolina St., Washington, Washington St., Mississippi St., Virginia, Rutgers, Syracuse, Akron, Utah St., New Mexico, Middle Tennessee St., Buffalo, Florida International, Toledo, Memphis, Houston, Louisiana-Lafayette, Wyoming, UTEP, Temple, Florida Atlantic, Ohio, Central Florida, Eastern Michigan, UAB, Louisiana-Monroe, North Texas, Kent St., Idaho, SMU, Army, San Diego St.

TWO LOSSES FROM NON-BCS CONFERENCES (18)
Marshall, East Carolina, Tulane, Rice, Southern Miss., Arkansas St., Navy, Central Michigan, Colorado St., Troy, San Jose St., Bowling Green, Northern Illinois, New Mexico St., Nevada, UNLV, Miami (Oh.), Hawaii.