The Potential Chaos of the College Football Playoff
Some champions would not cause the sport and its pundits to question everything about the Playoff and reality itself. Some would!
I don’t operate in the predictions business for two reasons: I have not developed the necessary skill set to be any good at it, and I enjoy being wrong about what I think will happen in a sporting event, because that hopefully means something unexpected happened. The element of surprise is a big part of what makes watching sports exciting for me in the first place, and I don’t feel compelled to try to remove that. (This is also why I don’t gamble on sports, because then being wrong about a predicted outcome becomes decidedly unexciting.)
I do, however, like to think about how sports and the systems around them make us feel. So I decided to look at the 12 participants in this year’s College Football Playoff and rank them by how much chaos they’d cause if they win the national title.
Chaos, in this exercise, means one specific thing – a general gnashing of teeth and wailing that college football’s playoff is not working. The most chaotic champion and the most surprising champion are not necessarily the same thing, however. Arizona State, for example, would be one of the relatively non-chaotic champs under my formula.
What formula? Let me show you what I’ve concocted.
In my mind, there are three factors that go into whether a team winning the playoff will lead to questions about that very playoff’s structure and format:
Path to Victory: In the four-team playoff, winning the title meant beating two of the other three participants. But in the 12-team version, even a team that didn’t snag a bye only has to beat four of the other eleven potential opponents. That means some schools will have a seemingly easier path than others, and if a team with one of those easier-looking series of opponents wins the title, complaining will commence.
I rated each team’s path on a scale of 1 to 3, with 1 being pretty challenging and 3 being comparatively light. This score only includes games through the semifinal, and it’s not based on any objective measurement of difficulty, just my personal assessment of how I think we’d collectively assess a path.
Surrounding Bullshit: Certain teams in the Playoff don’t check boxes that some people want from a national champion, so I created a scoring system to tally up those perception demerits.
- Teams that don’t have a strength of schedule in the top 50 got one point.- Teams that played in their conference championship game but didn’t win it also got one point.
- Teams that missed that conference championship altogether got two points. (Notre Dame only got half a point for not being in a conference at all and therefore avoiding an extra game; this isn’t something I feel strongly about, but other people will if the Irish win the championship.)
- Clemson got two points for entering the Playoff already saddled with three losses, because some fans and media members are gonna be real weird about a three-loss team finishing number one.
Could They Beat Bama: The Crimson Tide, 11th in the final committee rankings but left out of the bracket thanks to Clemson beating SMU, loom in the background of this entire proceeding. Whoever wins the Playoff will have achieved history…but they* won’t have beaten Bama to do it, and SEC fans will take to the phone lines to remind us of that.
To calculate whether a given playoff team could beat Bama, I compared that team’s F+ ranking to Alabama’s. Those who ranked higher than the Tide were deemed Able To Beat Bama and got zero points; those who ranked below but within five spots were labeled Maybe Good Enough To Beat Bama and got one point, and the teams ranked more than five spots below the Tide got two points, judged Not Likely To Beat Bama.
One more note before we get into the definitely-not-made-up numbers: I have not included Georgia or Oregon in these rankings because neither team winning a title this year would cause any meaningful chaos. Both would come with some element of surprise or history-making – Georgia’s somewhat injured and has not consistently played like a championship team this season, and Oregon’s never claimed a title in football. But the former won the 2021 and 2022 playoffs, and the latter is the only undefeated team left. A Dawg or Duck win will be greeted with “yeah, that’s a damn good team and coach,” not cries for postseason reform.
The other ten, well, that’s a slightly different story. Here are their composite Chaos scores, ranked from least chaotic to most.
MINIMAL CHAOS
Ohio State. After a fourth-straight loss to Michigan, the Buckeyes enter the Playoff the subject of anticipatory rubbernecking. What happens to Ryan Day if he loses at home to Tennessee? If they don’t, they’ll get a rematch with the Oregon team they narrowly lost to on the road, and a win there gets them either a Power 4 champion or Texas. Beating Oregon would largely blunt the primary demerit against the Buckeyes (that they didn’t make the Big Ten title game).
I suspect we’d quickly remember that Ohio State was a popular preseason pick to win the national championship and start writing the “Here’s How Ryan Day Learned How To Be A Champion” profiles and their close cousins, the “Here’s How Michigan Taught Ryan Day How To Be A Champion” posts on Michigan message boards.
Tennessee. Already beat Bama, which will solve that talking point in most places, though the most steadfast Tide fans will insist there’s no way Tennessee could have beaten Bama twice. Getting Ohio State on the road and then Oregon blunts any criticism that the Vols got an easy draw, though Georgia fans will argue Tennessee was lucky to dodge the Dawg side of the bracket until the final. That leaves open the possibility that Tennessee, who didn’t make the SEC title game, wins it all without defeating the conference champ. TRANSITIVE TITLE GO DAWGS ARP ARP ARP
Texas. The conference championship game losers who made the Playoff all put up valiant efforts in defeat, so I don’t think that factor alone will create a lot of fury should one of them win the whole enchilada. That said, Texas, like Tennessee, could do so without facing a Georgia team that beat them twice. DAMN GOOD DOUBLE TRANSITIVE TITLE ARP ARP. (I gave them another half point in the BS category for that.) The Longhorns won’t get a ton of credit should they beat three-loss Clemson, but having to hand Oregon its first loss balances things out for their victory path.
Notre Dame. To my eye, this half of the bracket feels like the easier path, not least because we don’t know how healthy Georgia will be in the Sugar Bowl for the quarterfinals. There’s a version of this where the Irish beat Indiana, a badly limited Georgia, and either Boise State or a team that lost its conference championship.
ESPN ranks Notre Dame 60th in strength of schedule. It’s not really the fault of the Irish that Florida State lost ten games this year and USC barely made a bowl game, but combine some unexpected schedule weakness with the general weirdness many people bring to Notre Dame remaining independent and there’s some room for chaos here. Not much, but some.
MEDIUM CHAOS
Arizona State. Here’s your first “hell no they couldn’t beat Bama” candidate, an Arizona State team with a middle of the road strength of schedule and the winner of a Big 12 that never developed a clear upper crust. That was great for intrigue and less ideal for interconference bragging purposes, but whatever! If the Sun Devils advance to the national title game, they’ll have beaten 1) either Clemson or Texas and 2) either Oregon or the team that took down the Ducks first. Someone from the Big Ten, the SEC, or both will complain about certain conference champs getting a bye in the current system, but that feels so likely no matter how the Playoff winds up.
SIGNIFICANT CHAOS
Boise State. Should the Broncos win the 2024 title, they will be greeted in some circles as the fulfilment of a dream delayed, the torch bearers that carried the legacy of so many Boise State teams that punched above their weight without ever getting a championship shot in the BCS.
They will also be derided by others as proof of postseason overreach. Why does this Mountain West team only need to beat three power conference opponents to win a title when the rest of this bracket had to defeat twice that many just to gain Playoff entry? If Boise wins a natty without beating a single Big Ten or SEC team – a slim possibility in this bracket, but a possibility nonetheless – does that even count?
SMU. A national championship would not reduce the wailing that Bama should have had this spot instead. It may, in fact, make it worse; if the Mustangs could ride the 12 seed to a title, imagine how easily the Crimson Tide would have done so! A strength of schedule in the 50s and a loss in the ACC Championship further add to SMU’s narrative struggles. I would like to see the American Athletic Conference make one of those BUILT HERE social media images in the event SMU wins it all. Seems only fair considering.
Clemson. If Dabo Swinney manages to win his third ring, they’ll have beaten at least one and maybe both of the betting favorites in the bracket (Texas and Oregon). F+ puts them eight spots below Alabama right now, but the memory of all those Saban-Dabo clashes in championship games might soften the insistence that these Tigers could not beat the Tide. The modern Clemson resume feels strong enough that they would not be a truly chaos-causing champion, even after this inconsistent season.
And yet, we’d have a three-loss national title winner. Maybe everyone’s very chill about that; we never expected to have a 12-team Playoff with nothing but undefeated or one-loss teams. Or maybe we spend the entire offseason arguing over whether the regular season still means anything if you can lose three times but still wind up the champ.
Penn State. The Nittany Lions gave me the initial idea for this post. Like Ohio State (and Notre Dame, who we’ll come back to shortly), they’re under intense pressure to win a home playoff game or cast doubt on the direction of the program. Like Clemson, they backed into their conference title game; unlike the Tigers, they didn’t win it. And, by virtue of the bracket, they’ll dodge at least one of the Big Ten teams that beat them and only face the other in the national championship.
Should Penn State win two playoff games, the cries will go up that SMU didn’t deserve to be there and that Boise State was an untested fraud. To be clear: this will be goalpost-moving. We’ll go from “James Franklin can’t win big games” to “well, James Franklin won those so they must not have been big games.” It’s not fair or rational. Chaos never is.
MAXIMUM CHAOS
Indiana. Let’s dispose of the easy parts first. Indiana’s rated a “maybe” for the question of beating Bama, though I suspect the Paul Finebaum extended universe would not extend the Hoosiers that courtesy, numbers be damned. They missed their conference championship game and spent most of the year attacked on strength of schedule grounds despite my reasoned pleas to the contrary.
What if Indiana beats Notre Dame in South Bend? Well, that just proves what we’ve known for decades: the Irish don’t show up when they’re on the biggest postseason stages. If the Hoosiers proceed to defeat Georgia? Just means the Dawgs were more beat up than we realized. Punch a ticket to the national championship game? Lucky Indiana wasn’t in the more competitive half of things!
These complaints would mean nothing to Indiana fans, nor should they. A national championship won in this playoff would be unimpeachable and a memory to be cherished forever.
But it would also cause incredible chaos. Championship Hoosier would prompt the college football world to twist itself into knots over every conceivable topic, blaming all of them for what clearly must be an error in the system. Blame scheduling inconsistency, or the transfer portal, or the failure to reseed teams during the playoff, or Indiana getting the shortest road trip in the first round, or eggs costing more now than they used to.
Naturally, I’ll be rooting for Indiana. Purely for scientific reasons, of course.