The College Football Playoff unveiled its first 12-team bracket on Sunday afternoon, ushering in with it a new era for the sport’s marquee postseason event.
Big Ten champion Oregon earned the No. 1 overall seed, with SEC champion Georgia next as the No. 2 seed. Mountain West champion Boise State was the third-highest ranked conference champion, so the Broncos got the No. 3 seed, while Big 12 champion Arizona State landed at No. 4. The top four seeds — all conference champions, per Playoff protocol — will all receive byes into the quarterfinals.
Texas was the top at-large team, checking in as the No. 5 seed, followed by Penn State, Notre Dame and Ohio State in that order. Seeds No. 5-8 will host first-round games on campus, so we’ll see games in Austin, State College, South Bend and Columbus.
Tennessee, Indiana and SMU were the final at-large teams into the bracket, and ACC champion Clemson earned the No. 12 seed as the fifth conference champion. The CFP selection committee chose to keep SMU in the field after a three-point loss to Clemson in the ACC championship over a 9-3 Alabama team with three top-25 wins. That was the most controversial decision in the first year of the 12-team bracket.
The first 12-team bracket of the College Football Playoff era is set. See who’s in and who’s out.
Here’s what else you need to know:
The “snubs”
Alabama fans are furious that SMU made the field without any wins against teams in the committee’s top 25. And while that is true, wins vs. the top 25 is not the only metric at the committee’s disposal, and the SMU-Alabama decision was about far more than simply these two individual teams. The selection committee had a decision to make about the future of conference championship games. In order to put an Alabama team into the field with a pair of losses to .500 teams (including a 24-3 loss to Oklahoma just two weeks ago), the committee would have to significantly penalize an 11-2 SMU team that played in the ACC championship — an extra game, while the Crimson Tide sat idle because they did not qualify for their league’s championship game. Obviously, the way SMU played Clemson factored into the final decision. The furious rally late to tie the game up in the final minute before the Tigers won on a 56-yard walk-off field goal surely impacted committee members. It was hard to watch that game and not believe that SMU was deserving of a spot in the Playoff.
Alabama argued that its rigorous schedule offset its losses, and that its best performances (as evidenced in its three top-25 wins) proved it could beat anybody in the country. SMU argued that it lost in an additional game that teams it would be compared to weren’t required to play. Mustangs coach Rhett Lashlee also pointed out that SMU was undefeated in the regular season after deciding to start quarterback Kevin Jennings.
But ultimately, I had no issue with the committee including SMU over Alabama in the final bracket. The Tide were extremely inconsistent this season, and they were particularly bad on the road. They only have themselves to blame for their own exclusion; they were a relative lock to make the field prior to that blowout loss to Oklahoma. Meanwhile, the committee made an important point by keeping SMU in the field even after a conference championship-game loss. This group wasn’t going to punish a team that had been so successful over the course of the regular season that it had to play an extra game while its peers sat at home. This selection committee wasn’t going to disincentive participation in league title games by eliminating SMU for playing in and losing its conference championship game.
Had the committee bumped SMU out of the field after it ranked ahead of Indiana and Alabama (both idle) just five days ago, no coach would ever want to play in a conference championship game again. You’d have teams sitting starters and/or trying to throw games down the stretch to avoid it. And games that drive revenue for the leagues themselves would be devalued considerably. The committee’s choice of SMU was its support of the status quo.
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The biggest surprises
I had projected SMU over Alabama, so I wasn’t terribly surprised that the selection committee did the same. I also wasn’t shocked to see Boise State stay ahead of Arizona State — the Broncos were five spots ahead of the Sun Devils in the penultimate rankings, before both beat top-25 opponents over championship weekend — but it was pretty cool to see the Group of 5 champion ranked above two different Power 4 champions. I don’t think I would have ever thought, in my wildest dreams, that the Group of 5 champion would earn the No. 3 seed in the very first year of an expanded field. That’s huge for the legitimacy of G5 Playoff contenders moving forward.
The most interesting ranking decision that the committee made was its ordering of seeds No. 5-7. The group put Texas at No. 5 after an overtime loss to Georgia (playing its backup quarterback for most of the second half) despite having no top-25 wins on its resume. I’d wondered how the committee would handle Texas suffering two losses to the same team, one coming in the (additional) conference championship game that other at-large teams would not be playing in. (Cough, Notre Dame. Cough, Ohio State.) The committee ultimately dropped Texas just one spot in its rankings, which allowed the Longhorns the highest seed available for an at-large team. This group liked Texas. It didn’t matter that they didn’t have a lot of meat on that schedule; the Longhorns had been ranked high the entire season despite teams (like Ohio State) below it with far better wins.
Meanwhile, Penn State lost to No. 1 Oregon by eight points in a very fun, exhilarating Big Ten championship game. The Nittany Lions, like the Longhorns, only dropped one spot in the rankings due to their conference championship game loss. (Essentially, both teams were bumped by Georgia leapfrogging them up to the No. 2 seed line.) Penn State only had one top-25 win on its resume, but the committee also liked this team, even after it lost to two of the best teams in the country.
Both Texas and Penn State stayed above 11-1 Notre Dame, which was an interesting choice by the committee. The Fighting Irish had been one of the nation’s most dominant teams all season long, but they also had the worst loss of any CFP contender and had just one top-25 win on its resume. Even though I could make a case to put the Irish ahead of Texas and/or Penn State because I think the Irish are a more dominant and consistent team, I can also see why the committee wanted to put the two teams with better losses ahead of the one with a loss to Northern Illinois. The committee was willing to forgive that loss but not forget it completely. And all three teams get to host first-round games, so all is ultimately well.
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Lessons learned
The selection committee did not want to completely upend the system in which college football operates today. It wanted to avoid penalizing the teams that played in conference championship games so those games continue to be played. They’re valuable to the leagues themselves, and if SMU had been knocked out of the bracket for playing in and losing one, no one would ever be incentivized to play in them again.
Texas, Penn State, Indiana and other schools also showed us that the committee was willing to forgive a relatively weak conference schedule. CFP committee chair Warde Manuel said a few weeks back that teams can only play the opponents they’re scheduled to play. That raised a lot of eyebrows at the time, because we’re conditioned to expect the selection committee chair to wax poetically about strength of schedule. But it’s really a fascinating statement in the era of 16- to 18-team leagues that no longer use divisions. Schools within the same league have drastically different schedules through no fault of their own. And this committee decided that it wouldn’t penalize Indiana for not playing the same teams that Ohio State did. Even Texas didn’t get penalized for playing an SEC schedule far weaker than Georgia’s.
The committee also seemed aware of the narratives surrounding its final decisions. Had Alabama gotten in as a three-loss at-large team so much of the conversation surrounding the bracket would be about SEC commissioner Greg Sankey’s influence on the committee and the CFP itself. We’ve already had commissioners calling out the committee for perceived brand bias, both at the individual school level and for the SEC as a league — which I’d argue certainly played a role in Florida State’s snub in 2023. If the public and representatives of the schools themselves lost more faith in the committee because it picked a big-name school that seemed to get an endless amount of mulligans, well, this whole discourse would have gotten even more toxic.
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What comes next
Well, we are going to continue to hear complaints from SEC country. I’m sure Sankey will criticize the committee for not rewarding his teams for playing such rigorous schedules (even though Alabama lost to teams that went .500 on the season but played better against the good SEC teams). Sankey has always been confident that SEC teams would get respect from the selection committee, no matter the makeup of the group or the type of season the top SEC teams are actually having. But he and Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti also put the committee on notice a few months ago by saying they’d be watching how the 13-member group evaluated and seeded their teams. Sankey won’t be happy that one of his teams was the first one out (and that Ole Miss and South Carolina were out as well).
It’s possible that leads to Sankey pushing for CFP reform ahead of the new CFP contract in 2026 — or maybe even next season. Does he get on board with the Big Ten’s idea of as many as three or four multiple automatic qualifiers for the Big Ten and SEC, which would then take decision-making out of the hands of humans on committee? If the top four SEC teams automatically qualified for the bracket every year, Sankey would not have to stump for his teams publicly like he did this month. Coaches also wouldn’t complain about challenging schedules as much if they weren’t evaluated by a committee that hyperfixates on the number of losses in the loss column.
Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne said Sunday night that he would re-evaluate Alabama’s approach to nonconference scheduling moving forward (even though two SEC losses were what kept the Tide out of the field). He’s essentially saying that there’s no benefit to scheduling other Power 4 teams in the nonconference if it could wear you out ahead of a tough SEC slate. I’d argue marquee nonconference games could help offset a bad SEC loss (say, to Vanderbilt) later on the in the year, but this appears to be a talking point that’s gaining steam in a league that plays just eight conference games. While I do agree that teams such as Texas and Penn State didn’t seem to get dinged this year for a lack of big wins, I think Alabama’s issues are actually with its own conference … not nonconference scheduling. The SEC added Texas and Oklahoma knowing everyone’s league schedules would get tougher. They added them because they’re big brands with historical success, and that increased the value of the SEC as a whole. If you’re frustrated that the schedule is so tough that you could lose to a team in the middle of the pack of the SEC, that’s really an issue with how the league is structured and how it’s scheduling.
