At the halfway mark of the 2017-18 college season, a bunch of D1A teams are in playoff limbo — and it's not the good kind.

There's a good kind of limbo? Yes, yes there is. The good kind of playoff limbo is, "Hey, if we win the rest of our games and those other guys lose a couple, we could be in!"

Teams in this position can still change their fate on the field. On the other hand, programs such as Army, Notre Dame College, and even Ohio State have finished their conference games. They didn't win their league titles, but they did well enough to hope the rankings leave them in the top 16 at the end of the spring season.

There is almost nothing these teams can do (OK, Army could beat Navy — that would help) to influence the situation. They just have to wait.

Well, we can't help with that, but we can have a little fun guessing the field for the D1A playoffs. This will be the first year since 2011 that all of the top college programs will be involved in the playoffs, and there are a lot more top college programs than there were six years ago. 

Below, we've put together a potential bracket of what the playoffs might look like in May. In it, we list the teams that have already automatically qualified (conference winners, in bold). We also plug in the teams we think will win the other conferences (Rocky Mountain, Mid-South, California, Red River, PAC). That's seven spots out of 16, so that leaves the independents and the also-rans. 

It's a bit of guesswork, and we leave one spot unclaimed (and it could be several more). But you get the idea, which is the fact that it's going to be very, very difficult to get into the playoffs and even tougher to move on to the next round. 

It was tough to fill out the entire list, so we've got an empty spot at No. 16. Obviously, some of the other spots could become open for the contenders at the bottom of the table to move in.

Here is our logic:

• Penn State and Indiana have won their conferences, so they're in automatically.
  
  
• Colorado State is halfway to winning the Rocky Mountain, and we're reasonably confident the Rams will accomplish that task.
  
  
• Texas A&M winning the Red River is a guess, and it could be Baylor, LSU, or someone else in the end. Think of A&M as a placeholder.
  
  
• Saint Mary's, Life, and Cal are heavy, heavy favorites to win their conferences, and we're seeding based on those teams doing exactly that.
  
  
• BYU, Navy, and Central Washington are highly unlikely to miss the playoffs given their past success and, for Navy, recent results.
  
  
• That leaves us with six spots for teams that didn't win a conference. Army seems like an excellent pick because the Black Knights are ranked highly and already have the Army-Navy game to prepare for. (Note, our original seeding had Army playing Navy in the quarterfinals, which we didn't want so we switched Army and Utah).
  
  
• As competitive teams playing in a spring conference, Utah and Arizona will probably be well positioned to be there. San Diego State is ranked highly at the moment in D1A, but we need to see more long-term success to feel confident.
  
  
• Mid-South also-rans usually make the playoffs in part because they play Life very close. Currently, we don't have Davenport in a slot, but that could change with a win over Lindenwood.
  
  

It's a be-careful-what-you-ask-for bracket. We wanted all of the best teams in one playoff, and to do that we see good squads left out (as it should be) or eliminated in the first round.