CSJ Sagarin FBS College Football Playoff Projection – Nov. 3
This year, the FBS title will have a 12-team playoff to decide the football champion–moving away from the past four-team field it had for the past decade. With CSJ, we have given the Group of Five schools coverage over the past several years and now at least one G5 school will be included every year in the College Football Playoff.
The playoff structure will be as follows with dates:
- First Round:
- Friday, December 20, 2024: One Game (evening)
- Saturday, December 21, 2024: Three Games (early afternoon, late afternoon and evening)
- Quarterfinals:
- Tuesday, December 31, 2024: Vrbo Fiesta Bowl (evening)
- Wednesday, January 1, 2025: Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl (early afternoon), Rose Bowl Game (late afternoon) and Allstate Sugar Bowl (evening)
- Semifinals:
- Thursday, January 9, 2025: Capital One Orange Bowl (evening)
- Friday, January 10, 2025: Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic (evening)
- National Championship Game:
- Monday, January 20, 2025: Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Atlanta, Georgia
The selection for the 12-team playoff will include the top ranked from five conference champions as automatic qualifiers. The remaining seven teams will be at-large selections.
The Top 4 ranked conference champions will receive a bye from the first round and will go straight to the quarterfinal round. The fifth conference champion will join the seven at-large selections and play in the first round at the higher seeded team’s home field.
From the quarterfinal and semifinal rounds, the playoff sites will be what used to be the New Year’s Six Bowl games. And the national title game will be played also at a neutral site.
At College Sports Journal, we have used the Sagarin Football rankings to conduct Group of Five and FCS Top 25 rankings for the past eight years. These rankings are one of the few rankings that take both FBS and FCS teams together in one ranking system. You can find Jeff Sagarin’s rankings at this link.
With these rankings, we have used them for the FCS playoff projections as well and we though with the FBS side moving to a larger field, we would start doing something similar.
Below are the projections for this week based after the Week 10 play:
This is solely based on the Sagarin rankings right now with the Top 5 ranked conference champions being the following:
| 1. Georgia (from the Southeastern Conference) |
| 2. Ohio State (from the Big 10 Conference) |
| 3. Miami (from the Atlantic Coast Conference) |
| 4. Iowa State (from the Big 12 Conference) |
| 5. Boise State (from the Mountain West Conference) |
The following would be the number of teams from each of the ten FBS conferences:
| Southeastern Conference | 5 |
| Big Ten Conference | 3 |
| Big 12 Conference | 1 |
| Atlantic Coast Conference | 1 |
| Mountain West Conference | 1 |
| American Athletic Conference | 0 |
| Sun Belt Conference | 0 |
| Mid-American Conference | 0 |
| Conference USA | 0 |
| Pacific Athletic Conference (not eligible) | 0 |
| Division I Independents | 1 |
With the reseeded Top 4, here is what the bracket would look if the Sagarin rankings were used based on the season to date through Week 8:
I will be making the Sagarin projections for the field each week until just before the actual committee field is produced in early December.
Originally from LaMoure, North Dakota, Kent is a 1996 graduate of North Dakota State University. His prior writing experience is over 15 years having previously worked with D2football.com, I-AA.org, and College Sporting News before coming to College Sports Journal in 2016. His main focus is college football is the Missouri Valley Football Conference within the Division I FCS. And in 2017, he began also to look at the FBS Group of Five conferences of the American Athletic, Conference USA, Mid-American, Mountain West, and Sun Belt.
Reach him at this email or click below:
