The 12-team College Football Playoff will make undefeated champions rarer. For some, this is a benefit. Some like parity. Some think this gives underdogs a better shot. For others of us, it’s not a lot of fun. One of college football’s best features historically has been its often undisputed champion. Not only was there no question who the best team was in 2023, 2022, 2020, etc., but the champion earned it every week of the season. There’s a satisfaction that comes with champions who are also the best team. Expand your postseason too much, and you wind up with a World Series between the Rangers and Diamondbacks.
But even for those of us who will miss that satisfying 12–0 or 13–0 or 14–0 or 15–0 champion, there’s upside here. If someone does go 16–0 (or, technically possible, a clean 17–0), it’s going to be even more impressive than undefeated championships were in the “olden” days.
At the moment, our college football model forecasts a 29% chance of an undefeated champion this season. Roughly three times a decade, we can expect a champion like 2005 Texas or 2019 LSU. There are two big caveats to that—first, that incentives could warp such that teams occasionally rest starters; second, that these simulations come from a world where the best team is thought to be nine points better than the third-best—but 29%. That’s not as bad as I would have guessed. And even if the number’s half that, we’re in a space where undefeated championships are both 1) still possible and 2) rare enough to be special when they happen. As someone who’s groused plenty about the ever-expanding playoff, that isn’t too bad.
For those who’ve been waiting on FCS Bracketology, we have good news: We’ve built our model’s selection formula, and we just need to get that feature into the simulations themselves. For those of you curious how many wins it will take to make the FBS’s playoff, we have bad news: We were going to write that up last night, but we realized we changed a readout from our model and will need to do some recoding to make it give us that again this year.
If you enjoy these posts and want to receive them more directly, we have two options for you. The first is to subscribe to our Substack, where we currently exclusively publish college football blog posts roughly six days a week. The second is to subscribe to our daily newsletter, a morning rundown of everything going on at The Barking Crow.
**
