This season, it's finally happening. The College Football Playoff has expanded from it's minuscule original 4-team format and has expanded to a new 12-team structure. With this change, the entire outlook of a season can change, and we no longer have to silently cry when our team loses a game and is officially out of consideration--unless your team is Georgia, Alabama, or Ohio State, in which case your team could probably drop 3 games without flinching.
We live in an ever-changing age of football, and with the new playoff format, we have some new rules of which you ought to become familiar. The new format includes 5 automatic bids reserved for the 5 highest-ranking conference champions. With the extinction of the Pac-12, that leaves room for one group of 5 champion to earn an automatic bid every season--Cincinnati and UCF died for this.
So, with the new format and an insatiable appetite for the football season, we're going to be teaming up with the rest of the FanSided NCAA network to deliver our College Football Playoff rankings predictions every week. In these way-too-early preseason predictions, despite not seeing a second of any team's real-time performance, beforehand, we're going to be telling you definitively who will be crowned conference champions and who will earn at-large bids by season's end.
Isn't this exciting? I'm sure you've already skimmed down to the list, so I won't waste any more time flapping my digital jaws. Here are our predictions for the 2024 College Football Playoff Rankings.
2024 Preseason College Football Playoff Prediction
Rank | Team | Reason | Previous Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
1 | Georgia | SEC Champion | N/A |
2 | Oregon | Big 10 Champion | N/A |
3 | Florida State | ACC Champion | N/A |
4 | Oklahoma State | Big 12 Champion | N/A |
5 | Ohio State | At-Large | N/A |
6 | Alabama | At-Large | N/A |
7 | Texas | At-Large | N/A |
8 | Penn State | At-Large | N/A |
9 | Kansas State | At-Large | N/A |
10 | Boise State | MWC Champion | N/A |
11 | Clemson | At-Large | N/A |
12 | Notre Dame | At-Large | N/A |
I'm sure you have a handful of objections to this list, but that's the beauty of preseason rankings: we never know until we know. These are our predictions for the end of the season, with a few notes to leave you with to explain some of our reasoning.
In our rankings, we have Boise State as the G5 representative (the Broncos will finally get their chance!), Oregon, Florida State, and Oklahoma State as conference champions (that probably drew your attention), and Utah--the Big 12 favorite--completely absent from the rankings.
I fuly acknowledge that my list will probably look foolish by the end of the year, but I'll be updating my predictions at the beginning of every week throughout the 2024 season. Hopefully by then I'll finally get a clue, right?