The Sweet 16 in the NCAA Tournament doesn’t necessarily represent the best 16 teams in the sport — merely the 16 teams that survived a four-day extravaganza of single-elimination mayhem. In college football, the sport remains a year away from the start of a bigger-than-it-is-now-but-still-much-smaller-than-basketball single-elimination tourney.

Before that new College Football Playoff format starts and reformats our idea of what constitutes success, we thought we’d take a crack at choosing the current best 16 programs in college football.

We kicked around the idea of a mathematical formula, but if you listen to our podcast, you know we’re terrible at math. Besides, math doesn’t tell the whole story. For example, we can point to Notre Dame winning 53 games over a five-season span as justification for a high seeding, but how much of the credit for those wins belongs to coach Brian Kelly, who now works at LSU? How much of that credit — if any — transfers to LSU because Kelly’s with the Tigers now? By the same token, how high should an Oklahoma program now coached by Brent Venables rank when the best of the Sooners’ recent success was led by Lincoln Riley, who now coaches USC? These factors had to be taken into account. And in most cases, we favored the programs whose arrows seemed to point up recently.

So, we loaded our (non) brackets pretty subjectively because college football is a fairly subjective sport until teams meet on the field. We’ll start at the top because you’ve probably already guessed our top two even if we differ on the order.

Andy’s Top Four

1. Georgia

2. Alabama

3. Michigan

4. Ohio State

Ari’s Top Four

1. Alabama

2. Georgia

3. Ohio State

 4. LSU

Andy Staples: Nick Saban always said behind the scenes that if Georgia got the right guy in place, the Bulldogs would dominate. At the time, the right guy was the Georgia grad running Saban’s defense at Alabama. Kirby Smart has two national titles in seven seasons and would have three if not for a second-and-26 overtime miracle that added one title to Saban’s incredible total. And even though I have Alabama second, I still think Saban has one more national title in him.