How to make bold (and smart) College Football Playoff predictions using the preseason Top 25

New York Times

14 hours ago

The most important thing to keep in mind as you put together your personal College Football Playoff predictions is they are all but guaranteed to be wrong.
So don't sweat it.
Nobody saw Indiana and Arizona State (combined six wins in 2023) as even long shots to make the first 12-team CFP. But if you were following along with me last year, before I joined The Athletic, you might remember I tried to warn you that history strongly suggested there would be at least a couple of surprise teams.
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Not only is picking a chalky bracket boring, it's just about as likely to be incorrect.
Using AP Top 25 preseason polls from 2014 to 2023 and comparing them to final CFP rankings over the same period, I came up with a very unscientific 'formula' for predicting a playoff bracket.
In Year 1 of the 12-team format, it turned out to be pretty accurate. The formula doesn't identify specific teams to select. It guides you to choose a specific number of teams from five tiers using the preseason AP poll.
Your 12-team bracket should include:
Last year, the bracket included four of the preseason top five (Oregon, Ohio State, Georgia, Texas; Alabama missed out), two from six to 10 (Penn State and Notre Dame) and two from 11 through 20 (Clemson and Tennessee). There were no CFP teams ranked 21 through 25 in the preseason and four CFP teams that started the season unranked (Boise State, Arizona State, Indiana and SMU). Boise State and SMU at least showed up in the 'Others Receiving Votes' section.
The point of the exercise is not necessarily to pick the bracket correctly as much as it is to get you thinking beyond the top 15 or so teams in the country.
It's highly unlikely a team that won only three games last year will make the CFP this season. Oklahoma State, anyone? But you might want to be open-minded about Houston (four wins), Auburn (five), Washington (six) or Georgia Tech (seven).
So have fun with it. In fact, use the formula to come up with several different combinations.
Even tweak the formula a bit if you want — as long as you're stretching your imagination at least a little. For my own 'official' picks, I just couldn't comfortably eliminate one of the AP's top five (Texas, Penn State, Ohio State, Clemson, Georgia).
For this column, I'm sticking with the formula.
Three unranked: Louisville, Nebraska, Tulane.
And here's the bracket:
Happy predicting!
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