It was an «almost» sort of Saturday in college football. No. 2 Indiana flirted with disaster at Penn State but survived thanks to an Omar Cooper Jr. toe tap. No. 9 Oregon nearly got Iowa'd but saved itself with an Atticus Sappington field goal. Auburn came close to actually winning a close game against a ranked team for once but got Diego Pavia'd in overtime and couldn't respond. We even had almosts at the FCS and Division II levels, where top-ranked teams North Dakota State and Ferris State each trailed late but rallied.
Granted, we still got some upsets. Two more top-15 ACC teams fell (in what feels like a weekly occurrence), No. 23 Washington fell to 2-6 Wisconsin in drizzly Madison, and Hawai'i knocked San Diego State out of playoff contention late Saturday night. Lord knows the ACC race doesn't make any more sense than it did a week ago, but Week 11 wasn't quite as chaotic as it could have been, and it ended up offering us a decent amount of clarity in the College Football Playoff hunt.
Using the same average CFP odds formula that I used last week — combining those of the Allstate Playoff Predictor with my own odds derived from SP+ — we now have eight teams with at least an 81% chance of making the field of 12. Loads of teams are in the hunt for those other four (or so) spots, but with three Saturdays remaining before Championship Week, let's again break contenders into tiers and talk about their most toxic traits, the flaws that will likely keep them from either winning the national title or reaching the CFP at all.
At a combined 28-0 with a 95% (Indiana), 75% (Ohio State) and 49% (Texas A&M) chance of finishing the regular season 12-0, respectively, these three teams are just about at the finish line when it comes
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