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Neil Paine
The 2024 college football season is going to be a big change.
A familiar program will be in a very different place. The Big Ten, for example, welcomes Washington, Oregon, USC and UCLA, ending the Pac-12 as we know it; it is one of several realignments taking place this season. Additionally, sports must continue to evolve the way players are compensated. And perhaps the most significant new wrinkle of them all comes at the game’s most high-profile stage: The College Football Playoff expanded the field from four to 12 teams this season, giving more schools a chance to win their way to the national title.
To find out, ESPN released its 2024 Football Power Index (FPI) ratings and projections, which include predictions for each team’s record, conference title chances, and of course, chances to make the playoffs and win. champion.
From the table below, many of the usual suspects are among the favorite programs to take the national title, but there are also uncertainties:
Before we dive deeper into forecasting, let’s talk briefly about how it all works. First things first: FPI is a power rating that tracks each team’s power relative to the average FBS squad. Teams are rated on offense, defense and special teams, with scores representing points per game. (So that means Georgia is rated nearly 27 points per game better than the average team, which is pretty cool!)
Those numbers are then used to simulate 20,000 regular season schedules, including conference champions and CFP brackets, simulating the selection process using an algorithm that mimics how the committee normally selects teams. Finally, once we get these results, we can tell you how often each team wins the conference, makes the playoffs and achieves other milestones.
Let’s break down some of the main storylines coming out of the FPI numbers ahead of the 2024 season.
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Dominate two conferences
Georgia leads ESPN’s early playoff predictions, making the expanded field in nearly 80% of our simulations and winning the national title more than 20% of the time. Additionally, the SEC (with a 53% chance of producing a championship) and the Big Ten (32%) dominate the ranking of national title chances by conference.
Among the teams with the most coin-flip chances to make the playoffs, the Bulldogs combined Oregon (76), Texas (68), Ohio State (67), Notre Dame (60), Penn State (59). %) and Alabama (57%). After that group, there is a considerable drop to the next level, led by Missouri, Oklahoma and Tennessee with 37% each.
How has the playoff expanded to change the shape of this obstacle? Overall, 18 teams now have at least a 20% shot to make the playoffs in our preseason model, as opposed to just eight going into last season.
Take a closer look at the all-important bye
While making the playoffs may be a certainty for the best programs this season, just qualifying is no longer enough. It remains significant to finish among the top four conference champions in the committee’s list, and thus get the all-important bye to the second round of the bracket. The team still needs to win three games to take the title (instead of two under the previous CFP format), but that’s still better than having to win four.
Here are the teams with the best odds of securing a first-round bye:
Interestingly, Oregon ranks highest in the nation — ahead of Georgia. This is the result of several factors: the Ducks’ fairly high chance of going undefeated (16%) against the new Big Ten schedule, and the fact that they have the best chance of winning the conference among power conference schools (37%). Both are good ingredients to break into the top four.
On a related note: Sorry, Notre Dame, but your team isn’t allowed to have a bye; only the conference champion is eligible. But with 60% odds, the Irish are far and away the most likely playoff team outside of the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten and SEC. We’ll also see at least one non-power-conference team make the playoffs this year, as the five-time conference champion is guaranteed a spot in the field.
Here are the odds for each Group 5 conference to send at least one team to the playoffs:
Florida and Washington moving in opposite directions?
Despite the importance of the new format, the 2024 season will still be defined by elite players and programs. In terms of pure talent, Georgia is easily ranked No. 1 in FPI — sitting about 2.3 points per game better than No. . Five teams projected at least three touchdowns better than the average FBS team: Georgia (plus-26.8), Oregon (24.5), Texas (22.9), Ohio State (22.2) and Alabama (21 , 9).
A number of schools have been promoted since the end of last term. Florida went from 41st to 20th on the strength of 15 returning starters and a strong showing on the transfer portal. Auburn and Kansas have also made the leap into the top 20 after finishing further down the list last season. Tennessee ranks more like its breakout 2022 campaign than 2023, when it comes back down to Earth, while Texas is projected to finish with its highest FPI (No. 3) since making the BCS championship game in 2009. Meanwhile, USC is projected. to hold steady at 18 despite losing quarterback Caleb Williams, this year’s No. 1 overall draft pick by the Chicago Bears.
In addition, FPI projections are down for two 2023 championship game contenders. Washington has dropped to 31, and defending champion Michigan has dropped to 12, after each school lost a head coach — Kalen DeBoer to Alabama and Jim Harbaugh to the Los Angeles Chargers — as well The starting QB and the most. from a beginning. How much the program can be uploaded again will be the storyline to watch this season. And one more recorded dip belongs to Kansas State, which falls from 11 to 22.
Here are the top 20 FPI projections for this year:
Can’t forget about Buffalo Deion
Where does Colorado Buffaloes Deion Sanders land in our ratings? They’re 36th, ranking 16th in offense with Shedeur Sanders returning at quarterback (along with plenty of new transfers, as you’ve come to expect from this program).
Along with a projected 6.3 win season, which may not be to Sanders’ liking – but with an uptick from 77th in FPI in 2023, the Buffaloes are projected to be the second best team in the FBS, behind only Stanford. (which went up from 106 to 59).
Colorado should benefit from a slightly easier schedule in 2024 — the Buffaloes rank 45th in projected FPI strength of schedule, up from 39th a year ago — and the scoring differential suggests the team is slightly better than last season’s record, both of which are signs of moving forward. . improvement in Boulder.
But if the Buffaloes are going to maximize their potential, they must win on September 28 at UCF, October 18 at Arizona and, most importantly, at Kansas on November 23. According to FPI. , it’s three games that swing Colorado’s odds to make the playoffs at least. Lose one of them, and Colorado has very little chance to make the bracket as a big or (more likely) conference winner out of the Big 12.
Mark ’em down: The biggest game of 2024
Along the same lines, let’s look at the best and most important games of the season, according to FPI. There are several ways to calculate this, starting with simply looking at the combined rankings of two schools in a given contest. By that measure, here are the 20 biggest games on the 2024 schedule:
But there’s another way to look at the top games, based on their impact on the postseason picture. Our simulations have a cool feature called “impact,” which measures the average change in odds (whether they are national title odds, playoff odds, conference title odds, etc.) for two teams depending on whether they win or lose a particular game .
Here are the 2024 games with the highest impact on who made the CFP:
Both rankings are mostly filled with games from the SEC and Big Ten, with some Notre Dame games, some nonconference tilts and the Clemson-FSU Week 6 matchup in the ACC.
One consequence of the expanded bracket is that there are fewer games that have a high impact rating on the two teams’ chances of making the playoffs, as more top teams have better playoff chances than before. But at the same time, the realignment has given fans more battles in the conference on the list, which is very important for the team’s chances to win the conference, and thus to secure one of the top four seeds.
That means that any fear that playoff expansion will dilute the importance of the regular season may be overblown. There’s still plenty to play across the country every week, and FPI rankings and projections will help you stay on top of it all.
