FCS Playoff Bracketology

Versus Sports Simulator projects the 24-team FCS football playoff field after Week 0 of the 2026 season. Montana St is the projected top seed. 11 of the 24 places go to automatic qualifiers and the rest are at-large. The selection committee picks the real field once the regular season ends. Updated August 1, 2026.

In this view, Versus projects the field the selection committee might pick in December, based on a Versus simulation of every remaining game. The model weighs how good each team is, the record it finishes with, and how hard that record was to earn against the schedule it played. It also rewards a team for winning its conference, and it moves a team down the order for every game it is short of a full 12-game season. The two choices above change only how Versus ranks the teams, and whether Versus simulates the rest of the season or counts only the games already played. Whichever pair you choose, each of the 11 conference champions receives an automatic bid, and the first round is paired to keep travel down.

Projected Field

Projected Bracket

We favor the team shown advancing in every game, and the percentage beside it is its chance of winning that matchup.

Swipe the bracket sideways to see every round.

Championship Odds

Versus simulated this bracket 20,000 times. The figures below show how often each team reached each round across those runs. The percentage beside a team in the bracket above is for one game against one opponent. The figures below cover every way the rest of the bracket could fall, upsets included. Click any team in the bracket to advance it and these figures change with it.

First Teams Out

How This Projection Is Built

Every unplayed game on the schedule is run through the same prediction model that powers the Versus game simulator, using the ratings as they stood after Week 0. Those simulations give every team in contention a projected record and a projected rating, and they project the final conference standings.

How the Field Is Chosen

The field follows the NCAA's rules for the FCS playoffs. Eleven conference champions receive automatic bids, decided by regular-season conference record rather than a championship game, and thirteen more places go to at-large selections. The top sixteen teams are seeded and the top eight receive a first-round bye. The MEAC and SWAC send their champions to the Celebration Bowl instead of the playoffs, so Versus leaves both champions out of the field. It leaves out the SWAC runner-up too, because the SWAC title game is played after the playoff bracket has already started. Any other team in those two leagues can still take an at-large place.

How the Seeds Work

Only the top sixteen teams are seeded. The top eight of those sit out the first round, and seeds nine through sixteen each host a game. The other eight teams in the field carry no seed at all. We number them 17 to 24 in the table above. The NCAA does not.

Nothing in the format says which of those eight travels to which host, so the committee decides, and so does Versus.

How the First Round Is Paired

The eight hosts keep the bracket position their seeding earned. The eight unranked teams are then assigned across those eight games under two rules: no team opens against a school from its own conference, and the field as a whole travels as few miles as the geography allows. The NCAA keeps teams within 400 miles of home where it can. Campus locations come from the U.S. Department of Education's college directory.

Five of the eight first-round trips in this projection are under 400 miles. The longest sends South Dakota to UC-Davis, 1,329 miles. No other pairing of these eight teams covers fewer miles without putting two conference opponents in the same game.

How the Projected Rank Is Read

Every team carries two ranks on this page. One is where it stood in the Week 0 FCS rankings. The other is the projected final rank, which is where Versus expects that team to finish once the season is over. Drake has the widest gap between the two of anyone in this field, 30th at Week 0 and a projected 65th once the season finishes. The projected final rank is the one that sets the seeding. It is also what separates two teams that finish with the same record.

How the Order Is Decided

The order of selection blends two things: how good the model thinks a team is, and how good that team's resume is. Blending them is our best approximation of how a committee weighs the two against each other. Beating a top-25 team in the division earns a little extra credit in the order, and the amount slides with how good that opponent was. A win over the top-ranked team in the FCS is worth half a place. A win over the 25th is worth almost nothing. A team with several of those wins might climb a place or two, which is enough to settle an argument between two similar resumes and not enough to lift a team over one with a better record.

Why a Short Schedule Costs a Team

A full FCS regular season is 12 games. The Ivy League plays ten. The strength of record column already handles most of that, since fewer games means fewer chances to build a record a strong team would struggle to match. On top of that, a team short of a full season moves down the selection order by 10 places for each missing game.

The size of the penalty comes from what the committee has actually done. In 2025 Yale won the Ivy League at 8-2 and Harvard finished 9-1, the only two teams in the Versus divisional top ten that went unseeded. Both played ten games.

Where the Numbers Come From

Most bracketology is one person's opinion written up each week. This projection is arithmetic. The same model that produces the FCS football rankings simulates every remaining game, applies the 2026 selection rules to the result, and seeds the field from it. Nothing is hand-placed, so the playoff rankings you see here move only when the games move them.

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