College Football Bracketology: Week 7, 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, where you can access CFP probabilities, national championship probabilities, single-game spreads, and more.

Cotton Bowl Side

First Round: 9-seed Mississippi at 8-seed Notre Dame
First Round: 12-seed Boise State at 5-seed Georgia

Rose Bowl: 1-seed Ohio State vs. ND/Miss winner
Fiesta Bowl: 4-seed Kansas State vs. UGA/Boise winner

Orange Bowl Side

First Round: 10-seed Penn State at 7-seed Oregon
First Round: 11-seed Miami (FL) at 6-seed Alabama

Sugar Bowl: 2-seed Texas vs. Oregon/PSU winner
Peach Bowl: 3-seed Clemson vs. Bama/Miami winner

**

Five big moves this week:

• Alabama is no longer the SEC favorite, returning the crown to Texas, who had the foresight not to attempt to play football this weekend.
• Ohio State takes over the top overall seed, making this the first time the SEC favorite hasn’t held the spot. In our model’s eyes, Ohio State is likelier to win the Big Ten than anyone else is to win any other conference, so while “eventual SEC champ” might have a better average final ranking than “eventual Big Ten champ” in our model’s simulations, Ohio State has a better average final ranking than anybody else.
• Tennessee falls out, with Mississippi not only reentering the field but leapfrogging Penn State and Miami. In a quieter result yesterday, Mississippi beat South Carolina soundly in Columbia.
• In another quieter result, James Madison went down against Louisiana Monroe, ceding the lead to Boise State in the race for the fifth automatic bid.
• Clemson and Kansas State flipped again after Clemson’s convincing win over Florida State. Our model’s remained high on Florida State relative to the consensus, so it was more moved than most by this result. It’s also higher on Kansas State than the consensus, though, so this nets out to a pretty normal projection.

More details:

• Tennessee is our first team out, followed by SMU, BYU, and Iowa State.
• Our model still projects only 8.3 of these teams to make the eventual playoff. That means it has four of the current twelve dropping out.
• The SEC now projects to send only 4.0 teams to the playoff, down from 4.3. That was a different kind of cannibalization than good teams beating good teams. The Big Ten drops from 2.9 to 2.6 projected playoff teams, with Michigan and USC doing the league office no favors. The ACC and Big 12 pick up most of the windfall, rising to a combined 3.4 projected playoff teams, up from 2.9. The Group of Five’s at 1.2 expected teams, with the remaining 0.8 expected bids going to Notre Dame and Washington State.
• Thanks to James Madison and UNLV losing, the number of Group of Five teams with better than a 1-in-20 playoff shot rises from four to seven, with Tulane, Army, and Toledo all inching towards realistic status. (Navy is just shy of 1-in-20, sandwiched between Toledo and Oklahoma in a very weird portion of that list.)

Looking ahead to Week 7:

• Ohio State’s at Oregon. The winner is almost definitely the Big Ten favorite.
• SEC favorites have struggled to hold serve the last few weeks, so if that’s a cosmic thing, Texas should look out as they go to Dallas for the Red River Shootout.
• Penn State goes to Los Angeles to play USC. That’s probably Penn State’s second-toughest game of the remaining season, with big conference title and playoff bubble stakes. Penn State and Oregon do not play this regular season. Ohio State plays both on the road.
• Mississippi’s at LSU, the Tigers looking to get on the playoff bubble themselves.
• Kansas State’s at Colorado, with Iowa State (at WVU), BYU (vs. Arizona), Utah (at ASU), and West Virginia (vs. ISU) next in line for Big 12 favorite status if K-State loses a second time.

Here’s how the picture’s changed, week by week. Apologies that the table keeps getting more crowded. We should have seen that coming. We’ll make this a graphic next week. Someone put a note in our PowerPoint file, please.