Which Conference Championship Could Upend the College Football Playoff? Shocking Predictions Inside!
Conference championship games have long been wrestling with their identity crisis — once the grand crescendo of college football’s fall symphony, now sometimes feeling like an obligatory commercial break before the main event. Sure, the College Football Playoff’s expansion has sprinkled fresh meaning into some matchups, handing automatic bids to teams that might’ve otherwise been sidelined. But let’s be real — the Big Ten and SEC title games often feel like déjà vu, where playoff spots are practically handed out like participation trophies, dampening fan enthusiasm (though hey, this year Indiana vs. Ohio State should fill those seats nicely). It even got to a point where some SEC fans secretly wished their teams skipped the conference game just to stay fresh for the playoff grind. Could conference championships be the next endangered species as the playoff footprint grows and gobbles up the calendar? Possibly. Yet, this season, there’s a spicy twist — thanks largely to the ACC, whose title showdown threatens to explode the traditional bracket and rewrite the underdog script. So, how chaotic could these nine league championship games get? Let’s dive in and rank them by the potential playoff pandemonium they might unleash. Ready for some gridiron drama? Buckle up. LEARN MORE.
To help you sort through these games, we’ve ranked all nine FBS league championship games by how much playoff chaos they might cause.
Conference championship games have had a rough few years.
The expansion of the College Football Playoff has given some of these games more juice, as it’s put automatic bids on the line for teams that wouldn’t otherwise get them.
But the “everyone makes the playoff anyway” status of the Big Ten and SEC title games has raised enthusiasm questions in both leagues. The Big Ten game often has gobs of empty seats, though it shouldn’t this year, with local darling Indiana and mega-fanbase Ohio State involved.
The SEC game is still a major spectacle, but a substantial number of fans in the past few years have wanted their teams to miss the conference championship so they can be fresher for the CFP.
Conference title games may not be long for this world, either, as the playoff expands in the future and takes up calendar space.
But this year, Championship Weekend has all kinds of juice. Most of it comes from one source: the ACC, which has suddenly presented a bracket-busting possibility unlike any in the CFP era.
To help you sort through these games, I’ve ranked all nine FBS league championship games by how much playoff chaos they might cause. There’s only one place to start.
1. ACC: No. 16 Virginia vs. Duke
A common misnomer about the playoff is that it guarantees a spot for the Power Four conference champions and the highest-ranked champ from the Group of Five.
Not quite, however.
The playoff guarantees spots for the five highest-ranked conference winners. In 98 years out of 100, those would be the winners of the four power conferences. But we are right on the verge of being in one of the other two years.
Duke has five losses but made the ACC Championship game on a tiebreaker technicality over Miami, Georgia Tech, Pitt and SMU, only one of which it even played this year. (And Duke lost that game to Georgia Tech.)
Tuesday night’s selection committee rankings release made it clear: The ACC is on the verge of missing the CFP. All it would take is Duke beating 10-2 Virginia as a 3.5-point underdog and James Madison avoiding one of the sport’s biggest upsets in years in the Sun Belt Championship.
Unless Duke beats UVA in such an impressive fashion to jump the No. 25 Dukes, any Blue Devil win will have the ACC watching the playoff from home. What an absolute scene!
The Blue Devils have a chance to grant a second CFP spot to the Group of Five and deliver the ACC one of the great embarrassments in its history.
Opta Supercomputer’s Win Probability: Duke 53.9%
2. Sun Belt: Troy at No. 25 James Madison
Of course, Duke’s operation to ruin the ACC requires the cooperation of the Dukes.
This should be no trouble, as 11-1 JMU is the best team in the Sun Belt by 100 miles and is favored by 23.5 points against a mediocre Troy squad.
I’d round down and put Troy’s chances of winning this game at zero, but keep the possibility in the back of your mind in case Duke beats Virginia.
Opta Supercomputer’s Win Probability: James Madison 94.5%
3. Big 12: No. 4 Texas Tech vs. No. 11 BYU
The Red Raiders’ spot is secure no matter what happens in North Texas on Saturday. That means that a handful of teams will be rooting hard for Tech.
A BYU victory would give the Cougars an autobid and result in a current at-large team getting bounced. For the moment, that at-large team would be idle No. 10 Notre Dame, which for some reason* got jumped by No. 9 Alabama this week despite the Irish destroying a bad Stanford team and Alabama barely surviving against an Auburn team that missed a bowl. (Committee chairman Hunter Yurachek says it’s because Auburn’s a hard place to play. OK, Hunter.)
*To me, this scans as the committee doing legwork to avoid the psychological challenge of removing Alabama from the field if it doesn’t win the SEC Championship. That means if Alabama and BYU both win their championship games, Notre Dame is out.
But what happens if BYU wins and Alabama loses? Would the committee drop the Tide below the Irish once again? If you think the committee is too friendly to Alabama (a reasonable view), you may take that as a rhetorical question.
Opta Supercomputer’s Win Probability: Texas Tech 65.9%
4. SEC: No. 3 Georgia vs. No. 9 Alabama
The Alabama at-large conversation can only happen if Georgia handles business as a 2.5-point favorite. An Alabama playoff controversy is always a deeply perverted sort of fun.
Opta Supercomputer’s Win Probability: Alabama 59.9%
5. Mountain West: UNLV at Boise State
What happens if Duke wins, Troy does the unthinkable and shocks James Madison, and UNLV moves to 11-2 by winning in Boise?
That would leave these three conference champs for two spots:
- 8-5 ACC winner Duke
- 9-4 Sun Belt winner Troy
- 11-2 Mountain West winner UNLV
It wouldn’t be Troy. But would the Runnin’ Rebels have a shot at beating out the Blue Devils? It’d be marginal, but I could see it. The gulf between two losses and five is wide, and UNLV won its only Power Four game.
Was that against a miserable UCLA team that was about to fire its coach? Yeah, but the Runnin’ Rebels would have a case.
Opta Supercomputer’s Win Probability: Boise State 54.8%
6. CUSA: Kennesaw State at Jacksonville State
Now imagine Duke wins, Troy wins, and 7-5 Boise State wins the Mountain West. Would a 10-3, Conference USA-winning Kennesaw State take a CFP spot over five-loss Duke?
I would figure not, especially because UVA would represent a nice win for Duke. But the chances are higher than zero, aren’t they?
I am confident enough to say this: It’s conference championship weekend, and thanks to Duke, the chances of playoff Kennesaw State are somewhere north of 0.0%.
Opta Supercomputer’s Win Probability: Jacksonville State 54.1%
7. Big Ten: No. 1 Ohio State vs. No. 2 Indiana
The No. 1 vs No. 2 game could unleash a classist sort of chaos, as the loser (especially if it’s Ohio State) lobbies for a first-round bye.
They’ll probably get it, too, and that’s fine. The absolute worst case for the loser is that this game is hosting a first-round game against a Group of Five team.
But they’d rather be resting and getting ready to head to a bowl site for the quarterfinals.
Opta Supercomputer’s Win Probability: Ohio State 59.9%
8. American: No. 24 North Texas at No. 20 Tulane
No real chaos potential here. With these teams both ranked ahead of James Madison and set to get a better win than JMU will get against Troy, whoever wins the American will take the first Group of Five spot.
This game will be funky, though: North Texas has one of the best offenses in college football and has hit the 50-point threshold in seven of 12 games.
This is the exceedingly rare game in which both teams’ head coaches have already signed up to coach elsewhere next year: Eric Morris at Oklahoma State, Jon Sumrall at Tulane.
Those transitions have been far less dramatic than the one Lane Kiffin created when he left Ole Miss for LSU. Sumrall and Morris will stick with their teams through the CFP.
Opta Supercomputer’s Win Probability: North Texas 57.2%
9. MAC: Western Michigan vs. Miami (OH)
No playoff stakes here, but a fun matchup nonetheless.
Miami is trying to win its second MAC title in three years and, much like in 2023, is relying on a backup quarterback to do it. Thomas Gotkowski is actually the RedHawks’ third QB of the season, and he only made his first start last week. The program had been scuffling since starter Dequan Finn left the team two-thirds of the way through the season.
WMU, meanwhile, has one of the best defensive players in the Group of Five: Edge rusher Nadame Tucker, whose 46 pressures and 14 adjusted sacks are both in the country behind Texas Tech’s David Bailey.
Opta Supercomputer’s Win Probability: Western Michigan 55.8%
For more coverage, follow along on social media on Instagram, Bluesky, Facebook and X.
The post Conference Championship Game Predictions, Ranked by Potential College Football Playoff Chaos appeared first on Opta Analyst.
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