2025 College Football Analysis, Part Seven: The Playoffs
After using a little math to make predictions about every conference race, it's time to project the 12-team college football playoff field and results.
Over the past few weeks we have covered a lot of ground in this series. We started back in 2024, took a close look at the schedule for the Michigan State Spartans, and then made some predictions about the winners of all nine Football Bowl Subdivision conferences.
Now, it is time to put all of the pieces together and make some predictions about the 12-team college football playoffs.
Review of Conference Champion Predictions
Table 1 below summarizes the results shared in the previous parts of this series regarding the two teams from each conference who are predicted to face each other in their respective conference championship games.
Table 1: Review of the predicted conference championship game participants based the preseason simulation results and the disruptive scenario.
The left side of the table presents the predicted conference championship participants based on the raw odds generated from my preseason Monte Carlo simulation of the full season. The middle of the table gives the results from my "disruptive scenario." This scenario starts by assuming that the favored teams win every single game on the full season schedule, but the results are then adjusted to add a historically reasonable number of road upsets.
The right side of the table gives the record of each team in the disruptive scenario as well as some of the notable wins and losses for each team in that scenario. I generally use the results of the disruptive scenario as my official picks.
Table 2 below shows the teams with the best odds as well as my disruptive picks for each conference champion.
Table 2: Review of the predicted conference champions based the preseason simulation results and the disruptive scenario.
Playoff Selection
Based on the current playoff selection criteria, the five highest ranked conference champions would earn automatic bids to the college football playoffs. Based on information in Tables 1 and 2, my disruptive scenario would result in the following automatic selections:
