Predicting which 12 teams will make the 2025 College Football Playoff

It feels like with the end of the college football season on Monday night, following the Michigan Wolverines’ 34-13 win over the Washington Huskies in the national championship game, an era in the sport came to an end.

No longer will we have a four-team College Football Playoff, and no longer will we have five power conferences dominating the landscape. Going forward, the 12-team playoff will come into play, and thanks to conference realignment, we have seen the Power 5 widdled down to what is essentially a Power 2 — the SEC and the Big Ten — with the ACC and Big 12 working to keep pace.

It’s fair to say that the 2024 college season will be the first of a new era. How long that era will last is to be determined, but the landscape will look far different this coming season than it has before.

For the purpose of this article, we want to look at the first year of the new expanded playoff, and try to project which teams we might see involved. At the moment, the format for the playoff is a bit in question. Previously, it was set so the top-six ranked conference champions would get in as automatic qualifiers, followed by the next six highest-ranked teams. That may change, now that there are no longer five “power conferences,” and it’s going to hard to justify giving an automatic qualifying spot to the winner of the Pac-2.

To work around that for the time being, though, we went forward using the 5-and-7 model, assuming that an AQ spot would go to the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, the highest-ranked Group of 5 conference champion. From there, the remaining seven teams would be decided by the highest rankings.

With all of that being said, here are the 12 teams that I predict will make it into the inaugural expanded College Football Playoff.

2024 Preseason Ranking: No. 1

Analysis

I’d argue that Georgia should have been…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/predicting-12-teams-2025-college-125102775.html

Author : Ducks Wire

Publish date : 2024-01-10 12:51:02

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