Season projections

How these are made

Each remaining game is played out with the model's own win probability, and each team's strength is allowed to drift a little from week to week, so a team's luck carries across its games. Games already played count as they finished.

Projected is the regular-season record; a conference title game is not counted. Bowl means six or more wins, with at most one win over an FCS team counting, and no losing record.

Conference title games go to the top two teams by conference winning percentage, or each division's winner in the Sun Belt. Ties are broken by the games between the tied teams and then by the model's rating; real conference tiebreakers go further, so treat close races as approximate.

Playoff odds approximate the selection committee: the five best-ranked conference champions plus the next seven teams, ranked by a formula fit to the committee's final rankings from 2015 to 2025. It weighs the model's rating, each loss, a conference title and whether a team plays in a power conference. The real committee weighs more than that.

Rank is the model's own power rank, not the AP poll. Methodology · Model record