There’s half a college football season left to play, and among the wide range of possible story arcs is this fun one: Alabama and Notre Dame could miss the playoff, while BYU and James Madison could make it.
College football is not a sport where anything can happen. We sometimes like to pretend that it’s weirder than it is, and for good reason: The players are 18 to 24 years old, and there’s so much passion involved that admitting how predictable it all can be would dull edges that we’d prefer to be sharp. Throw out the records when these teams get together, we like to say, because this is a rivalry. (The rivalry game that most often prompts that line of analysis is the annual one between Oklahoma and Texas. Last week, Texas won a 34–3 rout that went much like a spreadsheet would’ve told you it would go.) More than in any other big sport, we know what will happen in college football, right down to which five or seven teams out of 134 have an honest chance to win the national championship.
The 2024 season has been unusually bonkers. The title race is more diverse than maybe ever, and the second half shapes up to be a firecracker. Some of this dynamic is the natural consequence of a playoff system that has just expanded from four teams to 12, leaving more teams in the race for longer. But the season has brought unique chaos, the kind of chaos that in some cases has never erupted before. As a result, for the first time in a long time, I can tell you about college football’s uncertainty and not be guilty of hamming it up in the name of creating suspense. The truism is actually true now: We don’t know what is going to happen next.
The games of Week 6, two weekends ago, were some of the most volatile in the sport’s history. Only a handful of times in the long sweep of college football has one weekend produced so much blood from the top teams. The most lopsided football and cultural matchup in any conference, for decades, has been the one between Alabama and Vanderbilt in the Southeastern Conference. The Crimson Tide had not lost to the conference’s lone “smart-kid” school since 1984, a run of 23 wins in a row. But the Commodores stuck with the Tide punch for punch and ultimately delivered one more, while one of Alabama’s senior leaders on defense had a late-game meltdown. No. 1 Bama was a 22.5-point favorite in defeat, while the No. 4, 9, 10, and 11 teams in the Associated Press poll also lost—all but one of them to an unranked opponent, and even the ranked opponent from that group was No. 25. A weekend like that comes around not even once a decade.
Those upsets haven’t made for a national trend. Ranked teams are losing to unranked teams roughly as often this year as in any other year. But upsets this season are different from upsets in any other one, because nobody has a road map for how the College Football Playoff selection committee will treat teams that eat dirt and recover. The cynical and probably-true answer is that the committee will afford lots of grace to SEC and Big Ten teams while telling everyone else to deal with a smaller margin for error. But there are big questions.
For example, Notre Dame lost as a 28-point favorite to the Mid-American Conference’s NIU in Week 2, one of the most surprising regular-season results ever. Was that the end for them? A loss like that would normally be plenty to keep the Irish out of the playoff, but they’ve worked their way back to the No. 12 ranking in the media poll this week. (Playoff committee rankings start in early November.) A working assumption has been that SEC and Big Ten teams with two or conceivably even three losses will get playoff tickets, but does that apply when one of the losses is to Vanderbilt? How much margin do Alabama, Notre Dame, and other blue bloods still have? Might Vanderbilt actually not be that bad a loss?
Here we have a fun, unheralded consequence of playoff expansion. For years, everyone anticipated that tripling the field would give elite teams a cushion after crushing regular-season losses. That’s still inevitably true, but the 12-team field has also introduced a new kind of anxiety. Take Ole Miss, which has already taken two brutal losses to Kentucky and LSU in games the Rebels should have won. In any other year, Ole Miss would now be eliminated, and its fans could take up their usual, peaceful place getting drunk at tailgates in the Grove and not actually attending the team’s games. But now there’s an entire class of teams that can’t be sure if they’re eliminated from national championship contention. Ole Miss message boards this week are a mixture of fans dooming over the demise of a promising season and others rationalizing that an undefeated finish to the season might still get them into the playoff. The new system’s refusal to let dying teams’ fans have complete peace is an underrated feature.
All of this is good fun for people who just want to see the world burn. Will the national title eventually go to Georgia, Texas, Oregon, or Ohio State? It sure will. Anarchy in college football doesn’t last forever. But the wide-open nature of the expanded playoff, coupled with the early failures of some giants, has made for an unusually uncertain environment. Meanwhile, a list of programs with very real playoff aspirations right now includes the following schools, who, in any prior year with the same results, would be extreme long shots:
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Indiana, which has made all of five bowl games in the past 30 years and is unbeaten in its first year under a head coach it hired away from James Madison. Not even a year ago, IU was committing to a $15.5 million buyout to get rid of its old coach.
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Iowa State, a strong candidate for the title of worst football program in the power conferences from the 1980s until 2016, when current coach Matt Campbell took over. The Cyclones are out front in the Big 12, whose winner gets an automatic bid in the new format.
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Pitt, sitting pretty at 6–0 a year after going 3–9. This is a program that won national titles in 1937 and 1976 but has not been a serious modern player. Until now.
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Boise State, Tulane, and James Madison, the three front-runners for the one automatic playoff bid that will go to a conference champion outside the power conferences. Whoever gets the spot will be the 11th or 12th seed, but at least the entity that eliminates that team will be another college football team instead of a committee of bureaucrats collecting hotel points at committee meetings.
In the long run, the expanded playoff will wind up helping the Alabamas of the world recover from early-season missteps and retain a path to the title. Nothing in college football is really designed to help programs at lower stations. But if you care about a historically mediocre school that’s having a good year, you might think you can fly. It’s the middle of October, and fans of a bunch of elite programs are in a terrible sweat, while Indiana Hoosiers fans believe that no one in the world, not even God, could kill them. With six games and conference championships still to come, it is wholly possible that the have-nots get to have something nice while some of the most storied programs in the sport miss out. Not much in this game is ever new, but that is.
