Simulating the season using EA Sports College Football 27 - ESPN

If you're ready to skip right past one more month of preseason prognostication to find out how this college football season plays out, we have the answers.

We fired up dynasty mode on EA Sports College Football 27 and simulated the upcoming season over and over again to find out who makes the College Football Playoff, who wins the Heisman Trophy, which teams can win it all and which head coaches and star players are making moves in December.

When we attempted this project last August, the season simulations produced just two instances of Indiana reaching the CFP semifinals with no trips to the title game. But five simulations did have Miami playing for a national title, three had Lane Kiffin to LSU and one had Fernando Mendoza winning the Heisman. We'll consider those minor victories that prove this isn't a total waste of time.

For this year's edition, we've simulated the 2026 season a total of 26 times. The results were completely up to the computer — we didn't play any games and didn't adjust any rosters or settings — and some of them were completely ridiculous. Here's what we learned from College Football 27's forecast for the season ahead.

This year's 26 simulations of the upcoming season resulted in 42 different programs earning at least one College Football Playoff bid, including 35 teams from Power 4 leagues.

Miami led the way with 24 playoff appearances, followed by Ohio State (21), USC (19), BYU (16), Notre Dame (16), SMU (16), Oklahoma (15), Ole Miss (15) and Texas Tech (14). Defending national champ Indiana made its third consecutive CFP run in 13 of these 26 simulations.

Quite a few surprise contenders popped up over the course of these simulations. There were eight CFP bids for Nebraska and six for UCLA out