Well, the latest rankings experiment has more or less concluded.  So I won’t beat that horse here.  But how would a 16 team tournament really look in a more practical world?  So as a fun cross check, I messed around a bit:

• I aggregated three publicly available rankings.  Kenneth Massey and Jeff Sagarin‘s computer ratings along with the AP Poll.  Normalizing, racking and stacking them – you get something like this – I only rank the top contenders and the conference champs to get to a list of contenders for the national title (scale 0 to 1):
  1. Alabama – 1.000
  2. Oregon – 0.966
  3. TCU – 0.899
  4. Ohio State – 0.892
  5. Florida State – 0.877
  6. Baylor – 0.873
  7. Mississippi State – 0.830
  8. Michigan State – 0.815
  9. Ole Miss – 0.812
  10. Kansas State – 0.732
  11. Georgia – 0.731
  12. Georgia Tech – 0.694
  13. Arizona – 0.673
  14. Auburn – 0.663
  15. UCLA…