Who Has the Easiest — And Hardest — Paths in the College Football Playoff?

Another look at how seedings affected each team's chances to advance (and win the National Championship).

Matthew Golden and Texas have room to sprint to the title. (Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

We haven’t even kicked off the first-ever 12-team College Football Playoff yet, and it’s already clear that seedings are going to be a matter of great debate in this expanded format for years to come. The combination of automatic byes for Top-4 seeds, guaranteed places among that group for conference winners, and non-bye teams hosting first-round games is a perfect recipe for controversy over which teams were awarded an easier playoff path than others.

On Monday, I crunched the numbers on each team’s odds of advancing through the College Football Playoff, based on simulations using Sports-Reference’s Simple Rating System (SRS) scores. As part of that process, I also compared the “real-life” odds to a hypothetical format in which teams were seeded based purely on the CFP rankings instead of automatically giving Top-4 seeds to the four highest-ranked conference champs:

This was one way of analyzing the matter of who benefited from the inaugural 12-team CFP bracket format. But there are other ways we can isolate who benefits from an easier or harder path to the title, irrespective of their team quality.

Borrowing a bit from the idea of ESPN’s Strength of Record, which measures the chance a generic “good” team would be able to match or exceed a team’s record against the same schedule, I wanted to see the odds that a generic playoff team would be able to advance through the playoff bracket from each seed slot. So I reprogrammed the simulations to randomly replace one team with a generic-quality playoff team — set with an SRS of +16.7, which is the average across all 12 teams in the field — and tracked how far that replacement team tended to go when it replaced each seed.

Overall, seeds 1-3 have little difference in winning the title, though the 3-seed was slightly more likely to make the semifinal (going through the Penn State-SMU winner) and the 2-seed was slightly more likely to make the championship game (since it would go through either Boise State or that same PSU/SMU winner). But the 4-seed is clearly worse off, getting the Texas-Clemson winner and then either Oregon, Ohio State or Tennessee in the next round. No. 4 Arizona State had the worst title odds for any team seeded among the Top 8 in our real-world forecast for a reason.

Things are just as fascinating when we look to the next grouping of teams, the first-round host squads. While there isn’t much difference in path difficulty between No. 6 (Penn State) and No. 7 (Notre Dame) — a generic team is more likely to beat PSU’s opponent (Boise State) than ND’s (Georgia) in Round 2, but they’re equally likely to make the title game — the gap between No. 5 (Texas) and No. 8 (Ohio State) is sizable. While the 8-seed has an easier first-round matchup (Tennessee rather than Clemson), it’s due for a brutal collision course with No. 1 Oregon instead of No. 4 Arizona State if it wins.

Smart people had noted in the lead-up to the CFP selection that the No. 5 seed would have a built-in structural advantage because it gets the lowest-seeded team (No. 12) in Round 1 and is set to face the weakest of the bye teams (No. 4) in Round 2. While it’s not quite the equivalent of getting a “shadow” top seed — a generic playoff team would still rather be in Arizona State’s shoes than Texas’ — it’s actually pretty close. Our generic team is only slightly less likely to make the title game (15.8 percent versus 16.8 percent) or win the Natty (7.7 percent versus 7.9 percent) as the No. 5 than as the No. 4.

And then, among the first-round road teams, it appears to (perversely) be worse to be seeded higher than lower. Seed Nos. 11-12 have better odds to advance at every step of the tournament than Nos. 9-10 do, culminating with No. 11 having more than double the championship probability of No. 10. (5.7 percent versus 2.6 percent.)

Is that just a quirk of the 2024 season? Certainly, it owes to a nontrivial gap in SRS this year between seeds 7-8 (Notre Dame at +21.2 and Ohio State at +21.3), who play seeds 9-10 in Round 1, and seeds 5-6 (Texas at +19.6 and Penn State at +17.3), who play seeds 11-12. There is no obvious structural reason why the committee would slot lower-rated teams in at those seeds — though it’s worth noting that last year’s hypothetical 7-8 seeds (Ohio State at +21.6 and Oregon at +19.1) were also rated better than seeds 5-6 (Florida State at +18.4 and Georgia at +18.0).

Much of this is an unavoidable consequence of the bracket structure inherent to a 12-team tournament with four first-round byes. By guaranteeing that four conference champs receive those byes — in a season with only four power conferences, two of which are substantially better than the others — it all but ensures that multiple non-bye teams will be stronger than some of the teams they would face in Round 2 (on neutral ground, no less).¹

That doesn’t mean we’ll be seeing teams tank to get the 5 seed instead of the 4, or the 11 seed instead of the 10, anytime soon. The selection committee is far too capricious to even think about playing those types of games. But it does mean some seeds have a more favorable draw than others, in ways that don’t line up logically with the teams’ overall rankings.

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Filed under: College Football, Football Bytes

1. This is similar to the effect in baseball by which the top wild card team often has more wins than the worst division winner. The best runner-up from a larger group of teams is likely to be better than the worst leader from a smaller group of teams.