Brian Kelly prefers a '5+11' model for College Football Playoff

LSU head coach Brian Kelly sees the “5+11 model” as the best bet for the College Football Playoff moving forward. While that’s been on the table, there’s been no movement towards that format from the committee.

The 5+11 model includes auto bids for the five highest-ranked conference champions, but 11 at-large teams. The seeding is anyone’s guess in that 16-team format, but one would assume it would be straight seeding once all of the teams are selected.

Kelly thinks that’s the simplest way anyway. Heck, he’s advocated for a more data-driven approach to the CFP already, similar to the BCS.

“5+11. Well, I mean, pretty obvious, right?” Kelly said on Sirius XM. “I mean more automatics, you know? And the opportunity to maybe even steal another one. So I think that’s probably where all of our coaches are. Our concerns with the committee is in terms of weighting your schedule, they look at just the right hand column, and what that looks like. Not all losses are the same. And I know nobody wants to talk about losses, but the truth of the matter is, losses are different. 

“And I think we would rather see a cleaner understanding of the process. Look, when I was at Notre Dame, we played for the national championship against Alabama in 2012. That was the computer. It was all computer. Now we’ve moved very subjective. We’re over here. We need to move it back into the add some ratings. Billy Connolly’s got one. The Massey report, I mean, I know we can’t do an RPI. But if we can do something that brings the selection process into a finer line, we would be in good shape.”

Kelly thinks this is the way (not to reference The Mandalorian). The LSU head coach likes simplicity when it comes to the College Football Playoff.

“I think we started that with straight seeding,” Kelly said. “I think that was the first iteration of where we need to be. I think we can streamline it a little bit more with more data. And I think the more data we have, so you’re not just looking at the right-hand column, it can’t just be about that. It’s got to be about the best football teams.”

The CFP has a straight seeding model for this year, so the auto-bids for conference champions won’t automatically make them a top four seed. Still, the bracket is 12 teams, not 16, just yet.