How it works

The system was seeded from the final 1998 BCS rankings. Each tier has a fixed size; lower tiers hold the remaining FBS programs.

• Premier24 teams · the top flight
• Tier 224 teams
• Tier 326 teams
• Tier 426 teams
• Tier 512+ teams · all remaining FBS programs

Teams earn points by winning regular-season games. The reward depends on the opponent's tier at the start of the season — beating a Premier team is worth more than beating a Tier 5 team.

Tier is locked at season start. A Tier 5 team that climbs into the promotion playoff still counts as Tier 5 for everyone who played them that season.

Within each tier, teams are ranked by:

1. Points earned (most first).
2. Point differential — actual football points scored minus points allowed across the regular season.
3. Head-to-head result, when exactly two teams are tied on points and differential and played each other.
4. Higher start-of-season rank within the tier (used as the final fallback).

After the regular season, three things happen at the same time — they don't overlap.

Promotion

From every lower tier (Tiers 2–5):

• #1 and #2 are auto-promoted to the next tier up.
• #3–#6 play a single-elimination playoff (3 vs 6 and 4 vs 5, winners meet in a final). The final winner gets the third promotion spot.

Net: three teams move up from each lower tier.

Relegation

From every upper tier (Tiers 1–4):

• The bottom 4 play a survival bracket. In a 24-team tier the pairings are #21 vs #24 and #22 vs #23; in a 26-team tier, #23 vs #26 and #24 vs #25.
• Winners meet in a Survival Final. The Survival Final winner stays in the tier; the other three drop down.

Net: three teams move down from each upper tier — perfectly matching the three coming up from below. The pyramid stays balanced.

Main playoff

A separate twelve-team cross-tier championship, independent of promotion and relegation:

• Premier's top 8 (seeds 1–8)
• Tier 2's top 2 (seeds 9–10)
• Tier 3's top 2 (seeds 11–12)
• Seeds 1–4 get first-round byes.
• Single elimination from there. The final winner is the national champion.

Winning the main playoff does notsave you from relegation, and losing it doesn't cost you Premier standing. It's the cross-tier trophy, separate from the league pyramid.

Once movement is settled, next season's tiers are built from:

• Teams that stayed in their tier, sorted by their finishing points and point differential.
• Teams promoted from below (in order: regular-season top finisher, then second, then playoff winner).
• Teams relegated from above, dropping in at the top of their new tier.
• Any new FBS programs join at the bottom of Tier 5 the year they arrive (Buffalo and Middle Tennessee in 1999, UConn in 2002, James Madison in 2022, and so on).

Real promotion playoffs, relegation survival games, and the main playoff never actually happened — so we simulate them. Each game projects a score for both teams using their real regular-season performance:

expectedTopScore    = (top.PPG    + bottom.PPGAllowed) / 2
expectedBottomScore = (bottom.PPG + top.PPGAllowed)    / 2

Both scores are sampled around their projection with realistic variance, then the higher score wins. Same seed always produces the same bracket, so playoff results are stable across page loads. Dominant teams almost always win, but upsets happen — just as in real football.

• Regular-season scores, rosters, team stats, and FBS membership come from CollegeFootballData.
• Team logos are sourced via CFBD's ESPN logo references.
• The 1998 seed was built from final 1998 power ratings with manual tier assignments to fill out the pyramid.