The Ohio State Buckeyes wrapped up last season with 13 straight wins and won the inaugural College Football Playoff. As the first ever unanimous No. 1 in the preseason AP poll, they don’t show any signs of slowing down. Everyone and their mother is predicting that they are a shoo-in for the Playoff this season as well. Prediction, though, is a fickle beast.
It’s never easy to make substantiated predictions in sports, even with an abundance of statistics to back that prediction up. To make matters worse, the College Football Playoff provides us with a resounding dearth of statistics. We really don’t know what Playoff teams look like, simply because there have only been four of them.
Here’s what we know, or at least what we think we know: Teams that make the Playoff have to win a lot of games and lose very few. Not a single team from last year’s Playoff had lost multiple games heading into the postseason. Those teams went a combined 49-3 in the regular season. Any team that wants to make the Playoff will need a pristine record, and suffering multiple losses can all but crush a team's chances of playing for a national title.
While a stellar win-loss record won’t guarantee a spot, the most obvious characteristic of Playoff teams is that they are really, really good. That might seem like it goes hand-in-hand with a good winning percentage, but that’s not always the case. ESPN pegs Boise State as having an 11.3 percent chance of going undefeated (second only to the mighty Buckeyes, 31.2 percent), but would that put them in the Playoff? Likely not, as they currently have only the 35th-best Football Power Index, a measure of overall team efficiency in comparison to the rest of the nation, which isn’t Playoff material. The strength of your conference matters as well, which puts teams like Boise State that play in a non-Power Five conference at a clear disadvantage.
Charted below are the 50 teams with the highest FPI graphed against their projected winning percentage. Expect the four Playoff teams to be found somewhere in the top-right quadrant. Five teams stick out here: Ohio State, Baylor, TCU, Georgia and LSU.
Much was made last year about whether Playoff teams should be required to win their conference to earn a spot. The Big 12’s lack of a championship game severely hurts the chances of Baylor and TCU, as there could be a tie atop the conference, which happened last year, and likely kept both teams out of the Playoff.
The bar graph below shows each of the same 50 teams’ chances of winning their conference. You can probably disregard Louisiana Tech and Cincinnati, as no Conference USA or American Athletic Conference team will make the Playoff this year. Boise State would really need to do something special as well. The top-five here are Ohio State, TCU, Baylor, Georgia, and Oregon.
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All signs point to Ohio State returning to the College Football Playoffs, but the other three spots remain shrouded in mystery. There’s a lot of football to be played between now and Jan. 11, and all there is to do is sit back and watch.
