First, I need you, the reader, to suspend all disbelief immediately. I need you to dismiss any of the notions that this would never happen and just go with me on this journey. This is a fantasy College Football World and I want you along for the ride. I need you to set your mind free and fully venture into an offseason fantasy where the Commish is about to do something really dumb and incredibly time-consuming, simply because it is the offseason. Ok, did you do it? Good. Let’s begin.

What the hell is the FA Cup?

You may know this already, but if you don’t, the FA Cup is the world's oldest association football single knockout competition, organized by The Football Association, the governing body for the sport in England. The competition is open to all eligible clubs down to Level 9 of the English football league system, for a total of 745 teams.

The premise of this competition is that every team in this graphic above has a shot to win the FA Cup. However, the lower your league, the longer the path, and the more games you have to win to make it to the title game in Wembley Stadium.

As of the 2023–24 season, only eleven non-League teams have reached the fifth round proper (the Last 16), since 1925, and only Lincoln City have progressed to the quarterfinals (the Last 8), during the 2016–17 edition of the tournament. Every team gets a title shot. Something we don’t have in college football. While the current powers attempt to decide who gets what automatic qualifying spot in the College Football Playoff, the FA Cup is one of the oldest tournaments and gives the little team a shot every year.

You’re not going to create a tournament with 745 college football teams here, are you?

Yeah, this is actually the premise of the entire post. I am going to do this, and I know this will never happen, but I want to actually break it down, create a bracket, segment all the teams into the different levels and hypothetically play through some of these games to continue to advance in the bracket.

How are you going to rank all the 745 teams?

Well, the master guru of numbers, Mr. Bill Connelly of ESPN, actually tracks the rankings on his awesome SP+ formula. He listed all 764 teams in this formula and spreadsheet here. I couldn’t be an absolute Sicko here and do this exercise without him. Thank you so much, Bill, I appreciate it.

We have established that there are 745 teams in the FA Cup, and we will abide by this for the College Football FA Cup version, and that means we must cut 19 teams from the tourney before it even begins since this is how the FA Cup is formatted.

Keep in mind here, this is just to whittle down the entire massive amount of teams and leagues down, and when the teams in the Premier League (your Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester City, Chelsea) enter, they don’t enter until this section of the tournament is whittled down to just 32 teams and a total of 128 teams remain! So doing this College Football wise, the top 25 teams wouldn’t enter until so far down the line of the College Football FA Cup. Oh yeah, one final thing here, there are no seeds here in the FA Cup. It’s all a random draw! So we get to do that here too! Take that, Greg Sankey!

ACTUALLY, NO, WE’RE PUTTING ALL 764 TEAMS ARE IN THE COLLEGE FOOTBALL FA CUP!! NO ONE IS LEFT OUT!!! EVERYONE ENTERS!!

Ok, now the hard part is going to happen, and I will likely lose my mind in this process, but don’t worry I did not write this blog in one sitting. Here is how we will break it down for the 764 Teams in the College Football FA Cup. Each round draw will be a random draw until we set a hard bracket with the Final 16 Teams.

• Round 1 - 504 Teams Enter = 252 Teams Advance.

• Round 2 - 252 Winners From Round 1 + 4 New Entrants = 128 Teams Advance

• Round 3 - 128 Winners From Round 2 + 128 New Entrants = 128 Teams Advance

• Round 4 - 128 Winners from Round 3 + 128 New Entrants = 128 Teams Advance

• Round 5 - 128 Winners from Round 4 = 64 Teams Advance

• Round 6 - 64 Winners from Round 5 = 32 Teams Advance

• Round 7 - 32 Winners from Round 6 = 16 Teams Advance

• 16 Team Bracket is Set for the Final Path to the College Football FA Cup

• Round 8 - 16 Winners from Round 7 = 8 Teams Advance to the Quarterfinals

• Round 9 - 8 Winners from Round 8 = 4 Teams Advance to the Semifinals

• Round 10 - 4 Winners from Round 9 = 2 Teams Advance to the Championship

• Round 11 - College Football FA Cup Final played at the Independence Bowl

Yeah, so if you’re in the bottom 504 ranked teams, you’d have to win 11 Games, basically an entire season worth, to win the College Football FA Cup. Another reason why this will never happen.

ROUND 1 - The First 504 Teams Enter and 252 Survive.

How do you make a bracket for 504 teams? Well, I am not going to do that, but I will list all 252 Games here. You knew this was going to be a really long post. I am going to put the SP+ rank, school name and score.

Also, we did a random number generator for scores, please don’t get mad if your teams get eliminated. (finally, I am going to do this in multiple parts because this is going to we WAY TOO LONG for one post and I got to break up the bracket into 16 parts to make it readable for you.)

I love how North American shutdown their football program but are theoretically alive to move on in this hypothetical tournament.

I’m starting to realize we’re probably going to get a ton of people mad at the scores here when you see a team in the 700s beat a team in the 200s but all I really can say is that its THE MAGIC OF THE CUP!!

Hope you are still here with me in this ridiculous project we started…

Now remember, the seeding does not matter for Round 2! All the winners will get thrown into a pot and there is a random draw.

• Round 2 - 252 Winners From Round 1 + 4 New Entrants = 128 Teams Advance

• Four new teams are entering Round 2 - Welcome the new entrants below

  • 508 North Alabama

  • 507 Augustana (SD)

  • 506 Indiana (PA)

  • 505 Indiana State

SEE YOU NEXT TIME FOR ROUND 2 OF

THE SICKOS COMMITTEE

COLLEGE FOOTBALL

FA CUP