I’ll be honest: I know nothing about FCS football. But that’s what the SRS is for! If you want to read a real FCS playoff preview, SB Nation has a good one, as does the Sports Network, but let’s be honest, I have no idea how good those previews are. If you were to tell me that SB Nation just made up the name “Terrence West”, I couldn’t offer a counterargument.

That said, here is what the SRS says about the first round of the playoffs. Here’s how to read the table below: South Dakota State has an SRS rating of 30.1, the 8th best among FCS schools. In the first round of the playoffs, they go on the road to face Northern Arizona, which has an SRS rating of 23.5, the 27th best school in the FCS. As a result, the projected Margin of Victory – always shown from the perspective of the home team, is 3.6 points in the favor of the visitors. The table is sorted in terms of Game Quality, in case you need to determine which one of these games to watch. Game Quality is a proprietary statistic which meas… nah, even I’m not that crazy. The Game Quality rank is just a combination of the average SRS ratings of the two teams and the projected competitiveness of the game.

Butler (Pioneer Football League), Sacred Heart (Northeast Conference), Lafayette (Patriot League), and Furman (Southern Conference) are outside the top 30 in the SRS but earned automatic conference bids. That means the only at-large school to rank outside of the top 30 was #46 Southern Utah. So why did the Thunderbirds receive an unlikely at large bid?

In the top 46 of the SRS, only two teams had fewer than four losses and did not make the FCS playoffs: Harvard and Princeton, neither of which was an option. So that left the committee having to fill the final slot by choosing among Southern Utah and five other four-loss teams: Youngstown State, Chattanooga, Old Dominion, the Gators Destroyers Georgia Southern, and Liberty. In reality, Old Dominion was not an option: they are transitioning out of the FCS, and were ineligible for the playoffs (in fact, all four of ODU’s losses this season were to FBS schools).

So how to pick among Youngstown State, Chattanooga, Georgia Southern, Liberty, and Southern Utah? It is unfair to penalize Chattanooga for losing to Alabama or Youngstown State for losing to Michigan; on the other hand, Southern Utah lost to Washington State and Georgia Southern scheduled an FBS team — and won! Liberty also lost to an FBS school, but since it was Kent State, I’m not as sympathetic.

Youngstown State lost its final three games — albeit to three top 10 FCS schools — so I understand why the Penguins were not selected. It seems like Chattanooga has the biggest beef: a loss to Alabama shouldn’t count, and a two-point road loss to Georgia Southern and a three-point road loss in overtime to Samford are as good as a loss can get. The worst loss was by 10 against Tennessee-Martin, but they’re ranked 35th in the FCS SRS ratings. And while Southern Utah lost to an excellent Eastern Washington, the Thunderbirds lost by 34 and also lost to a bad UC-Davis team by 18. If you focus on margin of victory, Chattanooga was the clear choice, but one could make a strength-of-schedule argument for picking Southern Utah (wins over South Alabama and Montana State).

What about the second round of the playoffs? Eight teams receive byes in the first round; I’ve listed those teams below and used the projected winner from round 1 to determine the opponent for the teams on bye:

North Dakota State is the two-time defending champion and the #1 seed, but the SRS has them just a hair ahead of Eastern Illinois. Here’s the game-by-game breakdown for both teams this season, listed in order of single-game SRS (with Eastern Illinois’ games first, and NDSU’s second).

How good are these two teams? Northern Illinois may go to a BCS game, and the best team they faced all year was Eastern Illinois. North Dakota State won at Kansas State, the 23rd ranked team in the SRS. It would require a major upset to prevent these two teams from facing off at Toyota Stadium on January 4th.

Better luck next year

Left out in the cold: Villanova (6-5), Northern Iowa (7-5), Missouri State (5-7), and Southern Illinois (7-5) all had top-15 SRS ratings, but obviously bad records (due to tough schedules, poor luck late in games, and/or not having the grit to come through in the clutch) left all four schools out of the playoffs. All other top-15 teams in the SRS had two or fewer losses and made the FCS playoffs, with the exception of Princeton (the Ivy League finds the FCS playoffs beneath it). All in all, I’d say this reflects positively on the SRS, and also provides you with some ideas for your “over bets” on the 2014 FCS win totals. If you can find someone to set the line on “Missouri State 2014 wins” at 6, place a big bet on the over and call that man a sucker. In that order.