College Football Playoff projections after Week 3: Where things stand ahead of a big week

On paper, this is the biggest week of the college football season so far. There are six games between AP top 25 teams on Saturday, including three in the Pac-12 alone. We’ll know a lot more about the College Football Playoff picture after this weekend.

That means my College Football Playoff projection model will look very different next week when we have important results to add into the data. For now, this is just setting the stage for what should be a fun Saturday. Florida State and Georgia dropped a bit in the numbers after struggling through wins last week, but there weren’t many big moves.

Here’s some background on the model: I have developed a season simulator that produces odds for winning the national title, making the College Football Playoff, and winning conference and division titles. After every simulation is complete, I have developed a model that selects playoff teams. The playoff selection model is quite simple and very similar, in my opinion, to the committee’s selection process in that it creates a “resume strength rating,” derived from prior resume strength ratings, past playoff rankings and playoff selections for each season.

Let’s take a look at what the numbers say after Week 3. Here are the top 25 national title contenders according to my model.

Projected college football national title chances

What to watch in Week 4

Ohio State and Notre Dame are the headline for this weekend when it comes to marquee matchups with College Football Playoff implications. Ohio State is currently the third most likely team to win the national title while Notre Dame is 11th. A win for either team will likely see a big jump while a loss will almost knock each team out of the Playoff considering how difficult the remaining schedules are. My model gives Ohio State a 65 percent chance to win.

Clemson hosts Florida State in what’s somehow the second biggest game of this action-packed weekend of college football. Clemson already has a loss so this is essentially a must-win game for Dabo Swinney’s squad. My projections have Clemson making the playoff just 7.5 percent of the time. As for Florida State, a win on Saturday gives the Seminoles a seemingly easy road to the Playoff. They’d be favored by double digits in all but two games (vs. Miami and at Florida) while finishing the season with just one loss likely gives them a Playoff berth. My model has this game as a true coin flip with a projected spread of 0.0.

The Pac-12 has been impressive so far, but my model isn’t as high on Washington State and Colorado as the polls are. The numbers for most of the contenders in that conference are suppressed by having to play each other. USC is the ninth-most likely national championship winner followed by Washington (10th), Oregon (12th) and Utah (13th).