Who’s Got the Best Shot to Win the College Football Playoff?
And who benefited from the seed-based bracket format? Plus, ranking the CFP QBs.
Sunday was finally the big day when the 2024-25 College Football Playoff field was set, and — as predicted — there wasn’t too much left unsettled going into the selection reveal. The big question was whether the committee would side with 2-loss SMU (who lost a heartbreaker of an ACC title game to Clemson Saturday) or 3-loss SEC heavyweight Alabama… and, somehow, the upstart Ponies managed to get the nod over the established Tide. Better luck next time, Bama.1
Now, we get to see the much-anticipated 12-team playoff bracket in action. And yes, the bracket itself is a point of controversy — or at least, intrigue, in the way it set the paths for certain teams.
So let’s dive into who is most likely to win (based on the numbers) and who may have benefited from the way the format is set up this year. To do that, we’ll simulate the CFP 5,000 times — using each team’s Simple Rating System (SRS) score from the season to date, plugged into a logistic regression based on previous playoff games.2 Here are those results:
🏈 2024-25 College Football Playoff Predictor 📈
By this method, Oregon is your national title favorite at 19 percent — no surprise, as they are the No. 1 seed in the tournament and the sole undefeated team in the country. But the second- and third-most likely champs are Ohio State (16 percent) and Notre Dame (15 percent), who rank ahead of better-seeded Texas (12 percent), Georgia (11 percent despite having a first-round bye) and Penn State (8 percent).
Why is that? Both teams have fairly favorable first-round matchups — the Buckeyes are the biggest favorite of Round 1 (79 percent to beat Tennessee), while the Irish are 71 percent to beat Indiana. But both teams are also set up for brutal second-round battles (versus Oregon and Georgia, respectively), so it really just comes down to Ohio State and Notre Dame being the nation’s two best teams by SRS.
(Your mileage may vary there — they’re Nos. 2-3 in ESPN’s FPI, behind Texas, but they’re also Nos. 1-2 in cfbfastR’s Elo ratings, both ahead of Oregon.)
One of the weirder quirks of the new system is that only one of the first-round bye recipients (Oregon) is more than 50 percent likely to win in Round 2, with UGA being slightly worse than a toss-up against the Irish/Hoosiers winner3 and both Boise State and Arizona State looking like decided underdogs against, most likely, Texas and Penn State.4
On a related, format-focused note, there has been a lot of talk about whether the Nos. 5 and 6 seeds (Texas and Penn State, this year) have an undue advantage by virtue of playing the two lowest-ranked first-round opponents of any team, followed by the two weakest bye-earning conference champs in Round 2. And certainly the Longhorns have the second-best chance to make the semifinal (49 percent) of any team, trailing only Oregon.
But how much of that is due to the playoff format, with its guaranteed second-round berths for conference winners (even if they rank lower than other non-winners)? To measure that, I created an alternative format that only used the CFP rankings to set the bracket, regardless of conference-championship status:
Here are the simulated odds under that system, along with the biggest changes versus the “real” odds from above:
Unsurprisingly, Boise State and Arizona State would be the big losers under that system, as they would no longer be guaranteed a bye — or even a home playoff game — in a format seeded purely according to the CFP rankings. Tennessee and Indiana, by contrast, would come out ahead by getting to host first-round games.
But the really fascinating thing is that both Texas and Penn State actually fare worse under the real-world format — which supposedly they might be benefiting from — than they would in this hypothetical alternative system. Both teams would receive byes, and there would at least be some nonzero chance of facing lower-rated Arizona State or Clemson in Round 2.
Of course, the only format that really matters is the one at hand in real life, and that format will give us some very interesting on-campus matchups to kick off the playoff in a week and a half.
🏈 QB U: Best of the Playoff Field
Amidst the business of the baseball postseason and NHL/NBA seasons starting, my “QB U” college football quarterback column was put on a bit of a hiatus at midseason. But now seems like a good time to dust it off to rattle off a ranking of which playoff QBs had the best performances during the season so far, according to my Adjusted Points Above Replacement (PAR) metric in 2024:
Dillon Gabriel of Oregon comes in at No. 1, which is not surprising to readers who saw his top ranking in my returning QB ratings going into the year. But there are some notes to provide on this individual ranking. For instance, because of injury, Texas saw the biggest split in plays between starter Quinn Ewers and backup Arch Manning; while Ewers ranks 12th among playoff QBs above, the Longhorns as a team rank sixth in total PAR/13 between all of their QBs. Along those lines, here’s a look at each playoff team’s collective QB PAR production per 13 games this year:
This gives us perhaps a better view of which teams relied the most on their QBs to get them to the playoff. But the final twist is around the availability of Carson Beck for Georgia — Beck left the SEC title game after injuring his arm on the final play of the first half, and did not return:
Understudy Gunner Stockton had a higher QBR than Beck (63.7 versus 59.5) upon entering the game, and Beck — with 95.1 PAR/13 versus 113.7 in 2023 — hasn’t been quite as effective this season as expected anyway, which is why UGA ranks eighth (in a virtual tie with Kurtis Rourke and Indiana, whom UGA might actually end up playing) on our team ranking above.
But as decently as he performed against Texas, Stockton has only thrown 51 career passes with 9.0 PAR. If he has to play an entire game against the Notre Dame/Indiana winner on New Year’s Day, we would expect UGA’s QB play to be worse than its No. 8 ranking above gives it credit for — to the extent that matters. (The Dawgs ranked fifth in SRS offense despite Beck placing 14th in QB PAR.)
Otherwise, the rankings are about what we would expect from the odds table at the very beginning of the story. The only exceptions might be Cade Klubnik, whose stellar play could give Clemson the chance to pull an upset or two; Drew Allar and Kevin Jennings, the stars of the Penn State-SMU first-round tilt; and Rourke at Indiana, who can go roughly toe-to-toe with Notre Dame’s Riley Leonard on a per-game basis.
Filed under: College Football, Football Bytes, QB U
I liked it because, a) I’m always in favor of new teams making the playoff, and b) there’s something to be said for what you’ve actually done, in terms of winning more games (and losing fewer). Yes, Bama played the tougher schedule, but the teams’ SRS ratings were practically identical. In those cases, I think the better W-L record is a perfectly fine tiebreaker.
I also include a 3-point home-field advantage for host teams in Round 1. Overall in FBS this year, home teams in intraconference games won by 3.2 PPG, though that number dropped to 2.8 in power conferences. I split the difference and called HFA 3 PPG this year.
Which doesn’t even factor the injury to Carson Beck (although, based on the play of backup Gunner Stockton on Saturday, maybe that doesn’t matter as much as we would think).
SMU has a better chance (41 percent vs. PSU) to pull their first-round upset than Clemson (29 percent vs. Texas).