College Football Playoff projections after Week 6: How high should Alabama be?

Texas and Notre Dame lost last week, but the other main College Football Playoff contenders survived. There’s still other movement in how my model projects the CFP contenders.

Alabama shot up after its win at Texas A&M. One of Oregon or Washington will do the same after those two teams meet on Saturday. Georgia and Michigan are still viewed as the top two contenders.

Here’s how the model works: 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.

Here’s how the top 25 national title contenders rank after Week 6, according to my model.

Projected college football national title chances

Georgia’s chances dropped?!

Georgia’s title chances took a big drop last week, falling by 6.5 percent. That may surprise you after their demolition of Kentucky. It surprised me a little, but the main reason can be attributed to SEC foe Alabama. Alabama saw a 15.2 percent jump in playoff odds after taking down Texas A&M on the road last week. Alabama never dropped far in my rankings despite the perception of them having a down year. My model thinks the defense is elite and if Jalen Milroe can avoid the disastrous mistakes, Alabama can go toe-to-toe with Georgia. There is still a long way to go, but Alabama is a team to keep an eye on after its early season loss to Texas.

Texas isn’t out, yet

The Horns may have been down on Saturday, but Texas’ playoff hopes aren’t down and out just yet. My model still has them pegged to make the College Football Playoff about a third of the time.

With the rest of the Big 12 leaving a lot to be desired on the field, the Longhorns are likely to get a chance to avenge their loss to Oklahoma. As for the Sooners, their playoffs odds only jumped about four percent. My model is still coming around on Oklahoma. I still think Texas is the best team in the Big 12, but, admittedly, this number does seem a bit low. It will be interesting to track these two teams’ playoff odds over the next month and a half if they both keep winning.

A dozen realistic contenders

The realistic playoff teams seems to be cut down to 12, per my model. That’s the number of teams that have at least a 10 percent chance of getting selected by the committee.

I already talked about Georgia, Alabama, Texas and Oklahoma. While the other eight teams hail from the other three Power-5 conferences: three from the Big Ten (Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State), three from the Pac-12 (Washington, USC, Oregon) and two from the ACC (Florida State, North Carolina). Florida State and North Carolina avoid each other in the regular season so that could be an ACC Championship de-facto playoff game. But the three Big Ten and Pac-12 teams all play each other in the regular season. And the Pac-12 teams might see a rematch in the Pac-12 Championship Game. Either way, there are a lot of marquee playoff altering matchups coming up over the next month and a half. I cannot wait.