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There’s a 65% chance that this year’s national champion loses at least one game. In the years of the four-team playoff, six of the ten champions went undefeated. In the BCS era, ten of the sixteen champions went undefeated. If future 12-team and 14-team playoff seasons look like this one, we’ll see an undefeated champion only once every three years, a fraction of the rate at which we used to.
This is what our model thinks, anyway. In its simulations this morning, we get an undefeated champion 35% of the time. The most common teams to do it—Texas and Alabama—pull off the feat in a combined 18% of simulations. The next crop—Ohio State, Oregon, Penn State, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee—do it in 16% of sim’s. There’s a one percent gap still, and it’s made up of oddities, the littler guys, teams like Miami and Utah and UCF.
My guess, before I checked it, was that this change came more from conference realignment than from the expansion of the playoff. I thought that because the best teams must play each other more often now in the new Big Ten and new SEC, the eventual national champion would be likelier to lose in conference play, but that anyone good enough to get through those gauntlets unbeaten would be expected to romp through their three postseason games (at least to the same extent that they used to). That isn’t really the case, though.
Among the six conferences who ever sent a team to the four-team playoff, our simulations actually show roughly the same average number of undefeated teams, coming out of the conference championships, as we saw in the four-team era. It was 1.5 undefeateds a year back then. We’re expecting 1.7 undefeateds this year. Kick out Washington State’s undefeated shot, a scenario that doesn’t really parallel the undefeated contenders of the four-team format, and that drops to 1.5 undefeateds, an identical number to what we saw between 2014 and 2023.
What does this mean? An undefeated national champion will still matter, and will in fact mean a lot more. Such an achievement will be rare. But it isn’t the regular season which is going to chew more teams up. More power is consolidated into two leagues, yes, but those leagues will still produce unbeatens at a similar rate to before. It’s the playoff itself which is, contrary to my own expectations, going to make things harder. Some of this is that there’s a quarterfinal now, something which didn’t exist at all in the four-team era. But a lot of it is the increased difficulty of the semifinal round. In a previous season we’d be projecting a playoff which looked something like: Texas vs. Clemson; Ohio State vs. Alabama. Instead, the likeliest semifinal matchups involve Texas playing Alabama and Ohio State playing Georgia. That’s a harder path for the 1-seed, even without taking into account a quarterfinal showdown with someone like Penn State.
This still will often lead to satisfying champions, the thing which sets college football apart from college basketball, professional baseball, and sometimes even the NFL. But we’re going to occasionally see some perverted twists on the best-of-three series concept, instances where, for example, Alabama beats Georgia in the regular season and conference championship only to lose in the playoff, having been forced to play them a third time. Hopefully, those instances are rare.
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Miami won last night, in the literal sense, but it was not a good showing by the Hurricanes. How Miami played has largely been overshadowed by the dramatic finish, but The U is anything but back. Virginia Tech played its best game of the year, yes, and we can give them credit for that. However. Virginia Tech is not a great football team, and Virginia Tech’s execution was far from flawless. Miami won because two passes to the endzone in the closing seconds were technically caught out of bounds. That’s what it came down to.
The concern about Cam Ward is that he’ll get too chaotic, that he’ll try to make too many things happen and will end up fumbling and throwing picks. He did both those things last night. He did use his chaos for good in the end, his chest-pass ultimately Miami’s most consequential offensive play of the game, but it’s easy to see how a better defense will eventually give him fits. Maybe he faces that unit in ACC play. Maybe he doesn’t. It’s possible Miami gets away with all of this and even perhaps wins the ACC. Whenever it happens, though, exposure is coming.
It’s not just Cam Ward. That was a horrific defensive showing. One risk for Miami is Cam Ward floundering. Another is losing a track meet, which is how they almost lost last night. Mario Cristobal’s program is absolutely making progress, and this is absolutely a better Miami than we’ve seen under him before. But it’s not good enough yet. Whether it’s Clemson in the ACC title game or someone like Georgia in the Peach Bowl, this will end badly unless Miami discovers a lot more consistency and polish.
In the other game last night, we were reminded yet again how dumb it is to play for a tie. In some cases, sure, it makes sense to aim for overtime. But in all cases, overtime gives teams only about a 50/50 shot at a win. Attempting to extend a game with a low-probability field goal doesn’t make a lot of sense when you could attempt to win it with a low-probability shot at the endzone. Maybe I’m off on how those probabilities compared to one another in last night’s case specifically, but every time FOX flashed Grady Gross’s career long, I winced.
Enough about Washington, though. How about those Scarlet Knights? They’re on the edge of Movelor’s top 25 (that measures how good teams are, not how accomplished they are), and their average regular season record is now 9.1–2.9. They’re not a serious playoff threat yet, but they’re one win away from crossing that 1-in-10 threshold we’ve been using to check who’s realistic and who isn’t. They’re at 1-in-14 right now.
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Some Saturday resources, as things prepare to get underway:
- Our Movelor ratings and College Football Playoff probabilities.
- Our CFP bracketology.
- Our big ol’ Week 5 preview.
Bark.
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