The College Football Playoff field has been ordained, and Movelor, our model’s rating system, thinks Michigan is the favorite. It doesn’t think the Wolverines are the best team—it has them a 1.3-point underdog against Georgia in a hypothetical neutral-site matchup—but through the advantage of playing TCU in the first round, it has Michigan as the favorite. Here’s its overall read on the situation:
| Team | Movelor | Movelor Rank (FBS) | National Championship Probability |
| Michigan | 44.2 | 2 | 37.8% |
| Georgia | 45.5 | 1 | 34.6% |
| Ohio State | 41.8 | 3 | 22.2% |
| TCU | 32.5 | 11 | 5.4% |
Movelor isn’t alone in viewing TCU as the one of these four that’s not like the other. FPI has the Horned Frogs 10th in the country, and while SP+ has TCU 6th, it still views the Frogs as a nine-point underdog against Jim Harbaugh’s guys. Each of those two has Michigan further from Georgia than we do (the gap is 3.8 points by FPI, 3.0 points by SP+), so they don’t have Michigan as the overall favorite, but the message is similar everywhere: Michigan has a chance, and part of why they have that chance is that Ohio State has a chance as well.
As the games get closer, we can dig into the rating systems more deeply, and we can examine betting lines and matchups and the degree to which Georgia will enjoy home-field advantage playing their semifinal in Atlanta (we haven’t told Movelor that part, and to be clear, even a point or two of home-field bonus would push the Dawgs into favoritehood). But for now, what we’re really looking at is the following:
TCU is deserving in the context of this year’s field, and TCU’s a good team. They’re a fun team, they play hard, we cannot say enough good things about TCU. But if they’re going to win this title, it’s going to take one gigantic upset followed by another big upset (the second will be smaller because we will think TCU is a lot better than we currently do in the event they get past Michigan). It’s possible—there’s a 1-in-20 chance, far better than their playoff odds entering the season—but it’s unlikely. TCU is in the Utah/Cincinnati/Penn State tier of programs, a group which could pop off and make a playoff appearance but needs absolutely everything to go their way if they’re going to win a title. That’s a major step forward from where TCU was in September, which was the Texas Tech/etc. tier of programs, but it’s not Georgia. It’s not Michigan. It’s not even Notre Dame, who’s been in the playoff mix with some consistency the last few years. TCU is likely to go the way of Washington among former playoff appearers. We hope they don’t, because it’d sure be fun to see yet another frantic Horned Frog comeback, but that’s their projection.
Ohio State is in a treacherous spot in the landscape. They haven’t fallen as far as Clemson, but they aren’t in the spot in the hierarchy where they’re a reasonable national championship threat in a normal college football season. The second consecutive loss to Michigan cemented that. They could be a threat, but it’s unlikely. National championship-caliber teams these days just don’t have games that are that loudly bad. It’s not just a down year for Ohio State, either. They lost to Michigan last year as well. They were demolished by Alabama at the end of the 2020 season. They lost to a Clemson team at the end of 2019 who didn’t really compete against LSU. For a long time, Ohio State was a potent program that kept shooting itself in the foot. Now, it’s a fading power, still in command of a lot of starlight but seemingly disintegrating into the cosmic void. Its chance to dominate the sky is not a chance which relies on its own return to dominance, but on the vacating of power by everyone around it. To get off that metaphor: Ohio State isn’t good enough to win a national championship in a normal season. But it might be good enough this season, if it turns out Georgia isn’t as good as Georgia should be.
Michigan is on the rise, but we don’t know how high they’ve gotten. Movelor certainly thinks highly of them, but it’s high relative to the field and even it says Georgia’s better. Jim Harbaugh has gotten his team to a spot similar to those old Stanford teams of his, where they could believably win a title but it would take an upset. This is where powers come from—Ohio State was at this spot once, Clemson was at this spot once, Georgia was at this spot once—but for every team that pulled itself up onto the stage, there’s an Oklahoma and a Notre Dame who didn’t. Michigan’s earned their status as a large favorite against TCU. But year-in, year-out, they’re no Alabama as a program yet, let alone a Georgia.
As for Georgia…
We’ve been talking about programs and we’ve been talking about teams, and there’s an important distinction there. Georgia may or may not be the best program in the sport right now—it’s between them and Alabama, with Michigan in no-man’s land in third and then probably Ohio State, followed by thick collections of packs. Georgia is, however, the best team in the sport this year. The strength of a program is judged over multiple years. The strength of a team matters only every single week.
The question with Georgia is whether they really are the best team, or if they’re the best team by enough to stave off the randomness of a single-game championship. We think they are, but that’s built off of their title last year, a blowout of Oregon in September, and comfortable wins against most of the SEC, though crucially not against Alabama, whom they didn’t play. We don’t have a reason to think they’re not the best team, but they haven’t been as dominant as, say, 2020 Alabama or 2019 LSU or 2018 Clemson (as it turned out in the end). Those teams didn’t have many duds, if any. Georgia looked like something was seriously wrong at points against all four of Kent State, Missouri, Kentucky, and Georgia Tech, and while each game turned out ok, and a larger lens brings more to light so this may be an unfair scope of examination, there’s at least reason for hope if you’re pulling for Ohio State or Michigan.
As a recap, then:
Georgia is the best program in college football right now. Alabama sits behind the Dawgs, because until we see another season like this one, the fair guess is that this was a down year. Michigan sits behind Alabama, having vanquished Ohio State for the time being but not having proven itself national championship-capable. Behind Michigan is Ohio State, trending downward but possibly bottomed out in a spot as a top-four-not-top-two team. Behind Ohio State is a pack including everyone from Notre Dame and Clemson, who are reasonable playoff threats these years but not national championship threats, to Tennessee and LSU and USC, who may be rising towards greatness again but have tons and tons to prove.
Georgia is also probably the best team in college football this year, with Michigan likely the next-best, followed by Ohio State, followed by TCU. The key question here is how much better Georgia is. We’re going to get a good idea of that in about a month.
