The Weirdest Stuff That Could Still Happen in College Football’s Wacky Playoff Race
The final week of the regular season is pure chaos.
At the onset of fall, it was clear that the growth of the College Football Playoff from four teams to 12 would make this season unlike any other. It was less clear that things would get this weird.
Triple the size of the field for the sport’s biggest postseason event, and more teams will play nationally meaningful football deeper into the year. Ideally this wouldn’t be necessary; people seemed to like regular bowl games just fine until the mid-2010s, when ESPN’s coverage of the sport became so intensely about the new playoff system and lots of players stopped caring about nonplayoff bowls. But the toothpaste was not going back into the tube, and in a playoff-centric world, the way to imbue the sport with more meaning (and more television dollars for the biggest conferences) was to add more playoffs to the playoff.
Yet with one week left in the regular season, things are much messier than even most of us prognosticated when we mapped out what a 12-team playoff campaign would look like. The dawn of superconferences with 16 or 18 teams has made league championship races into a whole ruckus, and that’s left a bizarre array of potential playoff scenarios on the table with only one full week (plus conference championship games after that) left to go. More things could still happen than have ever been able to happen in college football, and as silly as you may think it could get, it could get sillier.
A few conferences have simple pictures. Exactly four Big Ten teams are just about certain to make the field: Oregon, Ohio State, Penn State, and Indiana. The Hoosiers, 10–1, briefly looked in trouble as they were getting routed at Ohio State last Saturday, but a brigade of Southeastern Conference teams lost their third game of the season later that day and provided some cushion. As long as Indiana doesn’t trifle with 1–10 Purdue, the worst team in the Power Four conferences, the Hoosiers are fine. Meanwhile, the ACC will send either SMU, Miami, or Clemson to the playoff, with some chance that the league grabs a second bid if Clemson wins this week against South Carolina but misses the ACC Championship. Meanwhile, the Pac-12, Mid-American, and Conference USA will send nobody to the playoff.
Elsewhere, it is a beautiful mess as far as the eye can see.
The Big 12 is the pièce de résistance of College Football Playoff variance. This league now has 16 schools in it, and roughly nine of them have pretty close to the same caliber of football team. Those nine are all within one game in the standings, and it is possible that as many as eight of them end the weekend with matching records. All nine still have at least a remote path to making the conference championship game next weekend in North Texas, and the Big 12 says that 256 combinations of opponents and seeds remain in play for that matchup. Arizona State (facing rival Arizona this week) and Iowa State (facing a tough Kansas State) have the closest thing to control of their own destiny but could, according to the league, miss out in complex tiebreakers even if both win this week.
Baylor and West Virginia fans have spent much of the past two years clamoring to fire their current head coaches, but neither of them is technically dead yet in the Big 12 race. Neither is Texas Tech, whose continued presence in the race allows the newspapers in Lubbock, Texas, to sell a bit of information and hope to Red Raiders fans: “Texas Tech football can still make the Big 12 championship game. Here are the scenarios.” This would be cool, as Texas Tech has never reached the game.
The race in the SEC, the sport’s best league, also has lots going on. Georgia has wrapped up one spot in the championship game, and either Texas or Texas A&M (whoever wins their rekindled rivalry on Saturday night at A&M) will join them. The championship game matchup is simple enough, then, but SEC fans have been racked with questions over the past few days about what happens after that. Last year, Georgia was the No. 1 team in America through the regular season but lost its playoff spot when it lost its first game of the year in the SEC Championship against Alabama. Nobody has any real idea how the playoff selection committee will penalize conference championship losers in a 12-team bracket, and thus things have gotten uncomfortable for a lot of fans with vested interests in the SEC race. At least four teams from the league should make the field, but nobody—not even Georgia with its ticket already punched to the conference title game—knows with absolute certainty that it will make it.
There are more big questions down ballot in the SEC. Tennessee will make the playoff if it beats Vanderbilt in Nashville this weekend, but if not, it’ll join a jumble of three-loss SEC teams that the committee has to pick through. South Carolina has charged hard late in the season and risen to No. 15 with an 8–3 record, and it might jump into the field if it wins at No. 12 Clemson on Saturday. But then what to do about No. 14 Ole Miss, which looks likely to have the same record as the Gamecocks and also beat them 27–3 earlier in the season? Ole Miss is likely out of the playoff race because it plays miserable Mississippi State this week, and beating a team that goes winless in SEC play should not help the Rebels leapfrog anyone. But could Ole Miss’ presence cause the committee to keep out South Carolina? The situation is awkward enough that it’s hard to predict. Compounding it, Alabama sits at No. 13, ahead of both the Rebels and Gamecocks, with its own three losses and a date this weekend with a sub-.500 Auburn team. Alabama also has a win over South Carolina.
Meanwhile, the 12-team playoff reserves a spot for at least one (and, most have figured, exactly one) team from the nonpower conferences, also known as the Group of 5. (That’s everyone outside of the Big Ten, SEC, ACC, and Big 12.) The Mountain West’s Boise State has the inside track at 10–1 and has so far ranked ahead of the entire Big 12, setting up the Broncos to get a bye week in the first round of the playoff while whoever wins the Big 12 needs to slug it out with some SEC or Big Ten team. The Big 12’s commissioner, Brett Yormark, is already pounding the table about why that wouldn’t be right, but it won’t be up to him. Meanwhile, there’s a nonzero chance that the Big 12 produces a champion with three losses. In that event, it’s highly unlikely but not totally impossible that the Big 12 misses out on the playoff altogether. It would require Boise State to stay on track behind the nation’s best running back, Ashton Jeanty, and the selection committee to find itself falling for an AAC champion Army team with one loss at just the right moment.
Or Tulane and Boise State could both miss out, and the Group of 5 playoff spot could either go to Army—which is 9–1 but just lost by a billion points to Notre Dame, a likely playoff team. Or, if Army were to lose this weekend and then beat Tulane in the American Athletic title game, perhaps the nonpower playoff spot could go to the Mountain West’s UNLV (which would have to beat Boise State) or, to get even crazier, the Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns of the Sun Belt. These are remote possibilities but real ones, a testament to just how many things remain on the table as the season winds to a finish.
As it stands, I assess that 28 teams have a better than 0 percent chance to make the playoff. Perhaps I should say 28.5, in case the committee reconsiders Ole Miss in the big pile of three-loss SEC teams. Last year at this same time, the number of remaining contenders was eight. Tripling the size of the bracket has more than tripled the number of quasi-contenders. Most have no chance beyond a rounding error at actually winning the tournament. The eventual winner will be Oregon, Texas, Ohio State, or Georgia. But the most fun you can have with college football is not asking the question, “Who is the best team?” It is asking something more fundamental, which fans of more teams can get behind: “So, you’re telling me there’s a chance?”
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