What the numbers say about the College Football Playoff Big 3 and the race for fourth

The College Football Playoff race is looking chalky at the top.

So much so that the Allstate Playoff Predictor has never been this confident in Week 3 on the top three teams' individual chances to land a berth to the playoff.

Never in the model's five-year history has it had three teams with at least a 70% chance each to reach the playoff ahead of Week 3 the way it currently does with Alabama (84%), Ohio State (80%) and Georgia (70%). And the cumulative 233% chance is also higher than the top three teams at this stage since and including 2018, when the Allstate Playoff Predictor began. And that's even with a narrow escape by the Crimson Tide against Texas last weekend!

And there's an incredibly high 43% chance that all three of those teams reach the CFP. Considering all the things that can happen between now and the conclusion of conference championships — and that two of the three teams are in the same conference(!) — that's pretty remarkable.

One way I like to visualize the playoff race is by looking at the top possible combinations of playoff teams. The table below is the top 10 most likely groups of four teams to reach the playoff, in any seed order.

Looking at things this way, we can again see the Crimson Tide, Buckeyes and Bulldogs still dominate: The top four most likely playoff combinations all feature all of them. And there is no single combination with more than a 3% chance of becoming reality that does not feature all of them.

That's not to say there's a guarantee about the current Big 3: 43% is 43%, and that means more likely than not at least one will miss the playoff, per the Allstate Playoff Predictor.

But where I think this chart is particularly interesting is, if we for the moment lock in the top three,