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What we learned about the College Football Playoff: Alabama out? Indiana in? Welcome to 2024

20 October 2024Last Update :
What we learned about the College Football Playoff: Alabama out? Indiana in? Welcome to 2024

The No. 1 team in the country went down. Unlikely unbeatens such as Iowa State, BYU, Indiana, Army and Navy stayed that way.

What we learned about the College Football Playoff race in Week 8 is that Alabama is in trouble, Indiana is for real and expansion is working exactly as hoped.

Bama on the brink

There is a very real chance the first 12-team Playoff does not include Alabama.

Alabama-Tennessee was billed as something of a Playoff elimination game, with both having already lost this month. That’s an overstatement, but a second SEC loss at this point of the season was going to put the loser in a precarious position.

Welcome to the cliff, Crimson Tide. The seventh-ranked Tide lost 24-17 to the No. 11 Volunteers, Alabama’s second loss in Knoxville in the last three years.

Coach Kalen DeBoer’s first Tide team has now lost two out of its last three since beating Georgia and rising to No. 1 in the AP poll.

“Yeah, obviously, a tough loss, a frustrating loss,” DeBoer said. “You know, we’ve had two now. And we just can’t play team football. Can’t bring it together. One side of the ball has highlighted moments and the other side, you know, stumbles.”

Georgia, meanwhile, hasn’t lost since letting a late lead slip away at Alabama, including an emphatic 30-15 victory at No. 1 Texas on Saturday night.

“The beauty of this format, losing a game doesn’t kill you,” Texas coach Steve Sarkisian told reporters. “Everything we want is still in front of us.”

The combination of those two results, plus No. 8 LSU and No. 14 Texas A&M beating Arkansas and Mississippi State to remain unbeaten in the SEC, is setting up a wild race in the nation’s best conference.

The last time the SEC had zero teams with unbeaten overall records heading into November was 2007. That year, LSU won the BCS title with two losses.

A two-loss national champion wouldn’t be shocking this season, but we also shouldn’t assume that 10-2 is going to lock up a Playoff spot — even for an SEC team.

The way things are going, there might be three to five SEC teams with double-digit victories before the conference championship game.

Austin Mock’s latest CFP projections have Alabama as a little better than a toss up to get in at 52 percent, with a 9-3 record. The Tide are currently the last at-large in the field, according to Mock’s projections.

With two conference losses already, getting to the SEC title game is going to be a challenge for the Tide. And Alabama still has a trip to LSU, which is looking more daunting every week.

“Certainly a lot of things are coming together for our football team,” coach Brian Kelly said after the Tigers won 34-10 at Arkansas to set up a huge game next Saturday at Texas A&M.

The Tide might have the ultimate trump card when it comes time for the selection committee to hand out seven at-large bids thanks to that victory against Georgia, which might very well be the best team in the country.

The bigger issue for Alabama is avoiding another loss this season. In three consecutive weeks, the Tide haven’t looked like a Playoff team.

Who can stop Indiana?

The Hoosiers are real, and they are spectacular. Coach Curt Cignetti’s crew overwhelmed Nebraska 56-7 to improve to 7-0 and have to be taken seriously in the Big Ten race as a team with double-digit win potential.

The Hoosiers’ fast start has been built on weak competition. Nebraska was viewed as something of a step up. Maybe not that big of a step up, but still. The Huskers came in with the sixth-best defense in the country, allowing 4.37 yards per play.

“I guess we passed that test!!” Cignetti posted on X.

“I know there was a national perception Nebraska had a pretty legit defense on a national scale, so maybe this will open (everyone’s) eyes,” Cignetti told reporters about his machine-like offense, led by Ohio transfer Kurtis Rourke at quarterback, Wake Forest transfer Justice Ellison at running back and James Madison transfer Elijah Sarratt at receiver.

For the sixth consecutive game, the Hoosiers topped 40 points. Their average margin of victory is now 48-14.

The simple question: Who is going to beat these guys?

Washington comes to Bloomington next week, and then the Hoosiers have a trip to Michigan State. Michigan visits in mid-November, and then the Hoosiers have a week off before what figures to be the biggest Indiana-Ohio State game ever in Columbus on Nov. 23. Indiana, as usual, finishes the season against in-state rival Purdue.

It would also be inadvisable to rule out Indiana beating Ohio State. You don’t want that smoke from Coach Cigs.

Indiana and its strength of schedule could be a major talking point when the selection committee starts ranking teams in about two and half weeks. The Hoosiers’ nonconference schedule was really bad: FIU, Western Illinois and Charlotte. Without Oregon, Penn State and Illinois on the Big Ten schedule, there is no arguing Indiana got a good draw. Welcome to the downside of an 18-team conference, where plenty of the top teams won’t face off.

Of course, it’s not just who you play, but how you play, and no team in the country is playing closer to its ceiling than Indiana.

Mock’s projections have Indiana as the first team out, with a 51 percent chance of making the field. The first in-season CFP Top 25 will be released Nov. 5. Anything else going on that day?

Primed for a Playoff run?

Is it possible Colorado might be a little underrated? It’s hard to imagine, considering what a lightning rod coach Deion Sanders and his team have been over the last season and a half.

The Buffs improved to 5-2 with a 34-7 victory at Arizona, after which Sanders called out President Barack Obama for picking against the Buffs at a political rally in Tucson earlier in the week.

Colorado has gotten a little better at protecting Shedeur Sanders, who has responded by playing like one of the best quarterbacks in the country. The Buffs have also improved year-over-year defensively, from really bad to merely below average. They have 15 sacks in their last three games, and that’s playing mostly without star cornerback (and receiver) Travis Hunter.

After collapsing following a 3-0 start in Sanders’ first season, Colorado should be at least on its way to a bowl game.

Now, there is no realistic road to the Playoff for Colorado as an at-large team. The Buffs lost their toughest nonconference game in lopsided fashion to an iffy Nebraska team, already have a Big 12 loss to No. 17 Kansas State and have no more ranked teams left on their schedule. Mock’s projections give Colorado a 1 percent chance to make the field.

But the Buffs are well positioned to be in the Big 12 race to the very end — a race that could get complicated by the fact that Colorado plays neither No. 9 Iowa State nor No. 13 BYU. The Cyclones and Cougars currently sit atop the conference standings at 4-0 after both made dramatic late-fourth-quarter comebacks to stay unbeaten.

Colorado, Cincinnati and Kansas State are next at 3-1. Forget the records: Kansas State had one wildly bad night in Provo, Utah — it happens — but has otherwise looked like the class of the conference. But the whole point of expanding the CFP to 12-teams was to allow way more teams to enter the final month of the season with high-stakes games. Next week in Boulder, the Buffaloes host Cincinnati in a huge Big 12 game, involving one of the most interesting teams in the country. Mission accomplished.

Notre Dame vs. America

Army and Navy are now a combined 13-0 overall and 10-0 in the American Athletic Conference, stacking up blowout victories. Army has yet to trail this season.

At this point, the possibility of Army and Navy playing in the AAC title game is looking fairly likely. Remember, the academies don’t play a conference regular-season game. Their annual rivalry game is still scheduled for the week after championship games are played and the CFP field is set.

Tulane plays Navy and will still have something to say about who wins the AAC, but the biggest beneficiary of the success of Army and Navy could be Notre Dame.

The Fighting Irish have been methodically recovering from being upset by Northern Illinois and have ripped off five straight victories, smothering Georgia Tech on Saturday facing the Yellow Jackets’ backup quarterback.

Notre Dame hoped to get a strength-of-schedule boost from games against Florida State (1-6) and USC (3-4) in November. Not happening.

The Irish play Navy next week at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, home of the Giants and Jets, then return to the New York area the weekend before Thanksgiving to play Army at Yankee Stadium in what Notre Dame calls its Shamrock Series — basically home games away from home.

Army and Navy have been great stories, but the fact is their unbeaten records don’t have much meat on them. Especially Army’s.

So while beating the service academies should give the Irish a lift, they’re not the type of opponents that Notre Dame would likely be able to use as a high-quality loss.

Notre Dame’s path to the CFP looks more like win out or bust, but maybe we’re underrating the likelihood that a bunch more losses are still to come for other contenders. Mock’s model has Notre Dame with a 70 percent chance to get in the field with a 10-2 record.

That other Big Ten sleeper

Illinois beat Michigan, which is in danger of becoming the first defending national champion since Michigan State in 1967 to finish with a losing record, setting up the Illini’s biggest home game … maybe ever.

Oregon comes to Champaign next week, giving Illinois a chance to throw a serious wrench into the Big Ten championship race.

After the Ducks, the Illini close with Minnesota, Michigan State, Rutgers and Northwestern.

(Photo: Butch Dill / Getty Images)

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