College Football Bracketology: Week 6, 2024

This bracketology is our College Football Model’s best current prediction of where the College Football Playoff field will ultimately land. It is not a reflection of where things currently stand. Here’s a link to an explanation of how it all works. Here’s another link to our model’s homepage, through which you can access CFP probabilities, national championship probabilities, single-game spreads, and more.

Cotton Bowl Side

First Round: 9-seed Notre Dame at 8-seed Oregon
First Round: 12-seed James Madison at 5-seed Texas

Sugar Bowl: 1-seed Alabama vs. Oregon/ND winner
Fiesta Bowl: 4-seed Clemson vs. Texas/JMU winner

Orange Bowl Side

First Round: 10-seed Penn State at 7-seed Tennessee
First Round: 11-seed Miami (FL) at 6-seed Georgia
Rose Bowl: 2-seed Ohio State vs. Tenn/PSU winner
Peach Bowl: 3-seed Kansas State vs. Georgia/Miami winner

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Three big moves this week:

• With their win over Georgia, Alabama became Movelor’s top-ranked team and SEC favorite. Their average final ranking in our model’s simulations is 3^rd, but that’s better than Texas’s, which is 4^th. Alabama takes over the top seed, bumping Texas out of a first-round bye.
• With their win over Oklahoma State and Arizona’s upset of Utah, Kansas State retakes Big 12 favorite status. Their average final ranking (15^th) is better than Clemson’s (17^th), so K-State takes the 3-seed and the right to play in the Peach Bowl, which is slightly closer to Manhattan than the Fiesta Bowl is.
• With Mississippi’s loss to Kentucky, Miami slides into the last at-large projection.

More details:

• Mississippi is our first team out, followed by Michigan, Louisville, and BYU.
• Our model expects 8.3 of these teams to make the eventual playoff. In the average scenario, four of the current twelve will drop out.
• Our model projects the SEC to send 4.3 teams to the playoff. The Big Ten comes next at 2.9, followed by the ACC at 1.5 and the Big 12 at 1.4.
• Only four teams—JMU, Boise State, UNLV, and Liberty—have better than a 1-in-20 chance of making the playoff out of the Group of Five. There remains a chance more than one Group of Five team makes it.

Looking ahead to the Week 6 games:

• There are no clear fulcrums in Week 6. Of the twelve teams in today’s projection, three are idle, and the other nine all play teams outside of Movelor’s top 25. Five of those nine do go on the road, though, headlined by Miami and Tennessee, who travel to Berkeley and Fayetteville, respectively. Someone will probably lose, and it will be a big deal when they do. It’s just very hard to know who it’ll be.

How the picture’s changed, week by week: