Projecting how the College Football Playoff for the 2025 season could play out - ESPN

The moment the season ended, the cycle began again. With the 2024 college football season in the books, we immediately pointed the discussion to 2025 with Mark Schlabach's Way-Too-Early Top 25. And before the conversation drifts to the NFL draft or the latest power grabs in store for the Big Ten and SEC, let's have a quick chat about the next College Football Playoff. Why not, right? We're all familiar with the format now (even though it might change soon) — might as well put that hard-earned knowledge to use.

Now, if we went strictly with Schlabach's rankings — and if we don't have any format changes until 2026 (which isn't a given) — we'd be looking at a projected CFP for the 2025 season that looks something like this:

First round

9 LSU at 8 Oregon (winner plays 1 Ohio State)

12 Boise State at 5 Penn State (winner plays 4 BYU)

11 Iowa State at 6 Notre Dame (winner plays 3 Clemson)

10 South Carolina at 7 Georgia (winner plays 2 Texas)

In terms of expectations, that's a perfectly sound place to start. (Though Penn State luring amazing defensive coordinator Jim Knowles away from Ohio State might have gotten them bumped up a spot or two in Schlabach's rankings.) Once I get my SP+ projections up and running in the coming weeks, they might say something similar. But while we get a lot of things right based on what's most likely on paper, let's talk about how this race will really go. Each conference title race brings certain rules to the table; for that matter, so do the battles for at-large bids and the Group of 5 auto bid.

So here's what we're going to do: Instead of simply using «Who are the best teams on paper?» as our guide, we're going to create some rules, some old-school heuristics, to guide us through precisely how