College Football

Playoff Predictor

We play out the whole season 10,000 times off our team ratings (with a preseason prior built from roster carryover, returning production and recruiting talent), then count how often each team wins its conference, makes the 12-team College Football Playoff, and wins it all. Our model's projections, graded in public. Updated Aug 22, 2026.

Conference Odds Projected Bracket

Projected national champion

Indiana

15% to win it all across 10,000 simulations

Most-likely 12-team field

1 Indiana Big Ten Champ bid Bye CFP 79%
2 Ohio State Big Ten Bye CFP 56%
3 Notre Dame FBS Independents Bye CFP 55%
4 Georgia SEC Champ bid Bye CFP 55%
5 Oregon Big Ten CFP 57%
6 Ole Miss SEC CFP 51%
7 Texas SEC CFP 41%
8 Miami ACC Champ bid CFP 54%
9 Utah Big 12 CFP 37%
10 Alabama SEC CFP 32%
11 Texas Tech Big 12 Champ bid CFP 42%
12 James Madison Sun Belt Champ bid CFP 19%

The single most-likely field: each conference's most-likely champion (the best five get the automatic bids), the rest at-large, seeded 1 to 12 straight by projected committee seed. Seeds 1 to 4 get a first-round bye; seeds 5 to 12 play the first round on the higher seed's campus.

This is one snapshot from the same simulation. Every team's full odds live on the conference odds view. The selection committee is modeled on its own history: a ranking model fit on every CFP committee poll since 2014 (93% pairwise accuracy on held-out seasons, including the committee's measured lean toward power-conference brands). There is no betting-market anchor in this sim: it is our model's honest read, graded in public.