College Football Playoff 2024 projections: Oregon rises to top; Indiana moves into bracket

These are the teams that have the best odds of making the new 12-team College Football Playoff, according to our model. The top four seeds go to the highest-ranked conference champions, with a fifth conference champion making the bracket too. How teams stack up in the race for automatic bids, first-round home games and staying on the right side of the bubble. We create an offensive and defensive projection for every college football team using various metrics, such as Expected Points Added and Success Rate. These projections estimate how many points each team would be expected to score and allow in a game against an average opponent at a neutral site. We then assign a probability of how likely a team is to win a given game by adjusting for opponent and location. Taking into account each team’s current record and remaining schedule, we use these game-by-game projections to simulate the rest of the season 100,000 times. We also created an algorithm to predict which 12 teams the College Football Playoff committee would choose. It’s inherently difficult to model the choices of a committee of 12 people, but we’ve created two quantitative metrics that reflect 10 years of data on the committee's decision making process: Strength of Resume and Strength of Record.