Hotter and fresher than even a Little Ceaser’s pizza, you can get the latest predictions here.

Thanks to some upsets last weekend, I only needed two 5-7 teams this time (as opposed to four last time). With 77 teams having already clinched eligibility, that means I don’t need a lot of upsets to get there. Let’s take a quick look at every game involving a 5-6 team heading into this weekend:

• Oregon State (5-6) @ Boise State: The Beavers won’t be favored in this one, but Boise has gotten by with closer margins the past few weeks. For now, I don’t have them in.
• Minnesota @ Wisconsin (5-6): Wisconsin is a slight favorite here, but I don’t have them in.
• Kansas (5-6) @ Baylor: KU’s vastly improved play the past few weeks isn’t completely reflected in SP+ yet, so I still have them winding up 5-7. It absolutely will not shock me if they win.
• Louisiana @ Louisiana-Monroe (5-6): hard to see ULM pulling this off.
• North Texas (5-6) @ Temple: UNT is absolutely favored here and I have them in.
• Eastern Michigan (5-6) @ Western Michigan (5-6): The Michigan MAC Trophy and bowl eligibility are on the line here.
• Coastal Carolina (5-6) @ Georgia State: CCU is absolutely favored here and I have them in.
• Auburn (5-6) @ Alabama: this would be hilarious, but no.
• Rutgers @ Michigan State (5-6): SP+ has Rutgers as about a 6 point favorite, but the Spartans could absolutely win this one.
• North Carolina State (5-6) @ North Carolina: the Pack would have to spoil Mack Brown’s swan song, so I don’t see it.
• Texas Christian @ Cincinnati (5-6): SP+ has Cincy as about an 8 point underdog, so I don’t have them in. But they could absolutely win this game.
• Virginia (5-6) @ Virginia Tech (5-6): self-explanatory.
• New Mexico (5-6) @ Hawaii: SP+ has the Lobos as an underdog, so I don’t have them in, but they could absolute win this game.

By my count, that’s 5 very plausible upsets. So we could possibly have too many bowl eligible teams. It’s happened before, and a new bowl game was invented on the spot to accommodate them, so it figures that it will happen again.

We’ll know how everything falls after this weekend, which makes the predictions next week one of the most important I do.

They’re hot and ready here. Let’s actually talk about the process a little bit this week.

Step 1 is to project out each team’s record. To make it slightly less vibes-based, I use SP+ to project each team’s remaining matchups. I ignore any team with 8 or more losses, as there’s no chance for them to make a bowl game. Step 2 is to project the playoff. This was hard when it was the BCS, slightly harder when it was the 4-team playoff, and now with 12? All bets are off, but I’m trying my best. This is also why the new projections tend to come out after the new rankings, as I use the current rankings to try to gain some insight into the Committee’s thinking. Almost certainly the most controversial choice I made was putting Indiana in over Tennessee. If what everyone thinks will happen to the Hoosiers happens this weekend, next week’s ranking will be very useful to determine if they still have a shot.

Step 3 is to start filling in the bowls based on the non-playoff teams. I start with the Power 4 and the zombie Pac-12, as their tie-ins are slightly less to the whims of what ESPN decides to do. After that, I start filling in the G5 teams as needed. The conference matchups you see on the page are more or less… guidelines, and generally speaking for any ESPN Events-owned bowl just about anything can happen. This makes this process maddening, but I’ve been doing this since 1999 and I’m not going to stop now.

Step 4 is to then determine what, if any, backfill is needed. Right now the projected record leaves me 4 teams sort of the 6-6 mark. There’s no transitioning teams this season that will be bowl-eligible, so we go straight to APR ranking the projected 5-7 teams. That’s how Cincinnati, Central Florida, Virginia, and Boston College got in this week. It could well be different next week, as upsets tend to add more 6-6 teams.

As a reminder, I have no special insight into what anyone who is responsible for these games is actually thinking. I don’t really keep track of the accuracy of the projections because of this. It’s gotten harder over time, but it’s still a fun exercise.

Some quick sports-columnist-esque notes on the matchups:

• Boise State’s best “win” is almost certainly going to be their 3-point less to Oregon back in September.
• I don’t really love that 8 of the 12 spots are going to the Big Ten and SEC, and I love even less the change those conferences are shoving through to give themselves 4 autobids regardless. I don’t think the ACC and Big 12 are necessarily doomed to only get one team in each season (and I definitely think the Big 12 will be better next season).
• The specific order of the CFP First Round matchups is more-or-less a guess, but I would guess if Oregon gets a late game, they will get one of the later slots. The main thing to watch is how the subcontracting with TNT goes, i.e., if ESPN gets to decide what to keep (because in that case, a Notre Dame home game would almost certainly be on ESPN).

That’s about it for now. Next week will be even more robust as more teams clinch eligibility and I only have to project out one game.

Welcome back to an annual tradition mine that’s now in its 25th year. Wow, that feels weird to say. I don’t have a lot of time to explain this at the moment, so let’s cut to the chase: I try to predict who will go where in college football’s postseason. I use SP+ to project each team’s record, and then I use those records to try to predict where these teams will go.

Expect a more detailed post next week. For now, the predictions are here. I’m two teams short currently, but that means I don’t need very many upsets to get enough teams.

They’re up and they’re here!

Let’s get right into it:

• There’s lots of garment rending and gnashing of teeth online at the moment regarding the playoff, but I think it’ll work itself out. Well, unless Oregon and Texas win. Which is what I’m betting will happen. At any rate, I will fully admit putting Oregon at #3 is just purely to get a traditional Rose Bowl. It sort of seems like that as long as Florida State stays undefeated, they’ll finish above any 1-loss team. We’ll see though!
• Predicting this stuff isn’t what it used to be. I used to spend the post-Thanksgiving period doing Google News searches for local beat writer articles about possible bowl destinations. Now, these articles are just summations of the more prominent national writers’ bowl predictions. Gee, awesome. The whole point of this exercise for me is to use my own know-how to try to get somewhere near what might happen.
• The exception of to the above is actually an article done the old fashioned way, and it’s very helpful because it tracks with what I was thinking and also changes my feel for how I think Georgia Tech’s bowl prospects look.
• On that note, this article out of El Paso is also helpful – if the Sun Bowl chairman is saying out loud that he wants two “name” teams, he might well get it. (Then again, at least on the ACC side it’s up to the conference, not the bowl.)
• On the 5-7 watch, we had to wait for the late returns from the West Coast and beyond, but with Cal whomping UCLA and Hawaii kicking a last-second field goal to conclude the regular season, we wound up 3 teams short. This means James Madison and Jacksonville State: step right up! And that means we need one 5-7 team, which looks like it’ll be Minnesota.
• With JMU going bowling, that means the Sun Belt gets 12 of its 14 teams in, which is a pretty big accomplishment for a non-power conference. (Since, generally, each of those teams pretty much starts with 1 loss due to a paycheck game against a power team.) I did some juggling with the ESPN Events affiliated bowls to avoid Sun Belt vs. Sun Belt matchups, and I don’t think what I did was unreasonable.

That’s about it. On Sunday, I’ll be following the announcements as live as I possibly can. There’ll be one last update Saturday night after the conference title games conclude to account for any new news after this or upsets, and the final predictions will be uploaded. I may not be able to make a post. If I don’t, I will be updating the predictions on Sunday. When this happens, as long as I don’t know future results, I do update the table to account for things I get wrong in the hopes of getting bowls further down the chain correctly, so keep that in mind when assessing how correct I was.

It’s that time again, and you’ll find the latest predictions here.

Notes and tidbits:

• This week I needed 5 5-7 teams, down from 7 last week. The trajectory is good, but we’ll need some big upsets to get all the way there.
• The Sun Belt has 9 teams qualified, and they’re certainly doing their part to plug a lot of gaps left by the decimated Conference USA.
• Speaking of the Sun Belt, while James Madison lost their NCAA petition, barring a lot of upsets, they’ll still get a bowl game at least. As a reminder, they would get in before any 5-7 team.
• Once again, unlike JMU, I don’t think Jacksonville State can get in this year since this is the first year of their FCS to FBS transition.
• Since Army and Navy aren’t already qualified, I don’t see them making it since the bowls are announced a week before they play. In addition, Army is 5-6 and played two FCS teams. Navy plays SMU this weekend and if they win, they’ll get in, but I see that as… unlikely.
• For the playoff picture, I realized that the Committee will likely rank the undefeated teams ahead of any 1-loss team, so Oregon slides down to the 4th spot.
• And finally, I needed no shenanigans to get Georgia Tech in, which is something I haven’t been able to safely do since 2018. That said, I really suspect we’re going to get the Sun Bowl or some such.

Playoff tiers:

• First tier: Georgia (undefeated SEC champ), undefeated Big Ten champ (Michigan or Ohio State), Florida State (undefeated ACC champ), undefeated/one-loss Pac-12 champ (Washington or Oregon)
• Second tier: Texas (1-loss Big 12 champ)
• Third tier: 1-loss Big Ten non-champ (Michigan or Ohio State)
• Fourth tier: 1-loss SEC champ (Alabama or (if only) Georgia), Washington (1-loss Pac-12 runner-up)
• In other words: if Georgia, Michigan, Ohio State, Florida State, Washington, or Oregon win out, they’re in. I’m aware of the Jordan Travis injury for FSU but if they’re undefeated they’re in.
• Texas, if they win out, is probably ahead of any 1-loss team that isn’t Oregon, though I could see Washington staying above them.
• We’d need a lot of weird upsets in the next two weeks to even really start talking about Louisville getting in. This is pretty much the whole field as I see it.