Will College Football’s Logjam Sort Itself Out?
If rankings history is a guide, things will find a way to get clearer by the conference championships.
College football picked one hell of a year to debut its brand-new 12-team playoff format.
So far in 2024, we’ve seen a quartet of undefeated power-conference teams emerge — Oregon, Miami, Indiana and BYU — of which only one (the Ducks) were really anticipated before the season. Then, behind them, we find eight more power-conference teams with a single loss, plus Notre Dame — a de facto power team, though they are ineligible for the new playoff’s conference-title perks — and an undefeated non-power team in Army.
And don’t forget the 10 major-conference teams with two losses stacked up behind them, a group that includes Alabama, Ole Miss, LSU, Clemson, Texas A&M and more. (Plus, we have three more 1-loss non-power teams, just for fun.)
Based on the way we used to think about tiering college football contenders, that’s 27 teams who are at least in the conversation for the 12 spots of the new CFP, before we even get into what can happen over the rest of the schedule — or the complications of automatic spots for conference champs versus at-large bids for everyone else. It feels like a logjam of unusual parity at the top of the sport.
But as unsettled as everything feels now, is it any different from a typical year in the pre-12-team playoff era? And how do these types of things usually get worked out?
To answer those questions, I dug into the historical data (since the dawn of the BCS era in 1998) provided courtesy of the excellent cfbfastR R package. For each season through Week 10 — aside from the weird COVID year of 2020 — I looked at how many teams fit into each of the following traditional categories of college football contenders at that moment in time:
Undefeated power-conference team
1-loss power-conference team
Undefeated non-power team
2-loss power-conference team
1-loss non-power team
Together, those groups used to make up the entirety of playoff teams in the four-team era, and that general pecking order should also guide the decision-making around the 12-team selection process this season. So how many have fit each category through Week 10 of previous seasons, versus this year?
This season is certainly top-heavy relative to the typical year. There are 13 teams in the top two tiers of teams, compared with 11.3 in the average season before 2024. Although there are fewer teams in each of the other categories, having more teams from the top few tiers than there are potential playoff spots seems like a recipe for controversy by the time selections are made.
However, not all of these tiers are created equal. Though we don’t know how often teams from each tier have made the 12-team playoff in the past (obviously, it hasn’t existed before), we can try to glean clues by joining our data up with historical pre-bowl rankings data — the AP poll before the CFP (1998-2013) and the official playoff rankings since 2014.
Putting aside the auto-bid situation again, how many teams from each tier at Week 10 ended up among the Top 12 by the time the pre-bowl rankings were released?
Through the uncertainty of future results and rankings decisions, even teams from the top tier — undefeated major-conference squads — have missed the Top 12 about 14 percent of the time, and the odds drop from there. Let’s apply those historical numbers to this year’s tiers of teams (breaking ties using cfbfastR’s version of Elo ratings):
Adding the expected Top-12 odds across each category, we get the equivalent of 3.46 “playoff” teams1 from the undefeated power-conference group, another 5.44 teams from the 1-loss power-conference group, 0.53 from the undefeated non-power group, 2.82 from the 2-loss power-conference group and 0.08 from the 1-loss non-power group. Sum it all up, and that’s 12.33 total expected playoff teams from the groups of teams that tend to be in consideration for the honor.
That’s a little bit more than there’s room for in the playoff — 2024 didn’t hit the nail on the head like in 2000, when there were exactly 12.0 expected playoff teams across our categories — but it’s not too much of a logjam, relatively speaking.
And that’s before we consider the specifics of how some of these teams will play each other over the next month, further weeding out members of the list. (This happened in previous seasons as well — hence the winnowing effect between Week 10 categories and the final rankings.)
Certainly, some team(s) will get their feelings hurt when the final selections are made — maybe not on the level of Florida State last year, but there will always be controversy no matter where you draw the in-versus-out line. But college football also tends to find a way of mostly sorting things out before it even gets to that point. While it may look like many teams are in the mix now, history says the Top 12 should find a way to settle out in a month.
Filed under: College Football, Football Bytes
I’m using scare quotes because, yes, simply being in the Top 12 in a pre-2024 season doesn’t perfectly map onto making the current playoff due to the conference championship factor.