As is often the case leading up the Vanier Cup, a lot of focus is put on football's playoff format. The most common suggestion for improvement is to add another round after the conference finals, increasing the number of teams in the national playoff to 8. However, those proposals have some significant downsides, such as the possible use of the rankings to determine the participants, and the de-emphasis of the importance of winning a conference championship (since the losing team might advance to same round as the winner). Because of that, I thought it’d be a good time to revisit and update a 12 team playoff proposal that has been floating around for a few years, which I believe offers a better solution.
As before, the regular season remains the same. The biggest change is to the conference playoffs, which are reduced to a single round used to seed the 12 team bracket.
Conference Playoff Round
Conference playoffs now occur over a single week, with two sets of games taking place:
Conference Championships (winners receive a bye to round of 8, losers takes the conference's 2nd seed for the round of 12)
Hardy Cup (1st CW vs 2nd CW)
Yates Cup (1st OUA vs 2nd OUA)
Dunsmore Cup (1st RSEQ vs 2nd RSEQ)
Loney Bowl (1st AUS vs 2nd AUS)
Play-In Games (winners to the round of 12, losers eliminated)
3rd CW vs 4th CW
3rd OUA vs 6th OUA
4th OUA vs 5th OUA
3rd RSEQ vs 3rd AUS
Playoff berths are proportional to the size of each conference. Since this format was last proposed, Bishop's moved from RSEQ to AUS, giving the two conferences 5 teams each. To accommodate that change, their 3rd place teams will play one anther for the right to advance, rather than deciding that in a RSEQ 3rd vs 4th game.
After the conference playoff round, teams are seeded into a 12 team bracket (team designations are CW1, CW2, CW3, OUA1, OUA2, OUA3, OUA4, RSEQ1, RSEQ2, AUS1, AUS2, AQ3).
Round of 12
CW3 at CW2
OUA3 at OUA2
OUA4 at RSEQ2
AQ3 at AUS2
This is the biggest change from older 12 team proposals. Previous versions sought to minimize rematches by spreading conference teams throughout the bracket. However, since this would add multiple rounds of playoff games that involve cross country travel, it is unlikely to be feasible. Instead, I have grouped first round match-ups by geography. Travel for this new round of 12 would not be much worse than the current conference playoffs.
Round of 8
Quarter final games are hosted by AUS1, RSEQ1, OUA1, and CW1. Match-ups will rotate.
As with all proposals to expand the playoffs, this is where we start to add significant travel. Four new Bowl games will be created. One could be a revived Atlantic Bowl, hosted by the AUS champion. The Churchill Bowl could also be revived (I’ve placed it with CW, but it has historic ties to Ontario and Quebec as well). Match-ups rotate, with conference winners and runner ups placed on the opposite sides of the bracket.
After the round of 8, we continue with the semi-finals (Mitchell Bowl & Uteck Bowl) and Vanier Cup.
Example Brackets
Here is an example bracket, showing conference seeding that would align with this year's bowl rotation (some new bowls have been given place holder names):
And here is that same bracket with hypothetical results (loosely based on actual games played this year, though you can argue a few games could easily go a different way):
This updated format reduces travel costs in the first round, taking away the one aspect that previously made adopting a 12 team format infeasible. There are still some issues and barriers that may prevent it from being adopted, but if USports is going to change the playoff format, I believe this would be better than expanding to 8 teams. Unlike most 8 team formats, this 12 team format does not need to use rankings to determine playoff finalists, and also provides a suitable reward to conference champions by giving them a bye and having them host a national Bowl game afterwards.
What do you think? Join the discussion here or at: http://www.cisfootball.org/forums/showthread.php?14496-Revisiting-the-12-team-national-playoff
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