ESPN's Bill Connelly... 2026 college football simulations: CFP, conference title odds

[Gerry Hamilton]

Highest national title odds, per SP+
1. Ohio State (14.2%)
2. Oregon (11.1%)
3. Notre Dame (10.4%)
4. Georgia (7.4%)
5. Indiana (7.1%)
6. Texas Tech (4.6%)
7. Miami (4.4%)
8. LSU (4.1%)
9. Texas (3.6%)
10. Texas A&M (2.9%)
11. Missouri (1.8%)
12. Penn State (1.8%)
13. Virginia (1.7%)
14. Alabama (1.7%)
15. Oklahoma (1.6%)
16. Tennessee (1.5%)
17. Michigan (1.4%)
18. BYU (1.4%)
19. Washington (1.3%)
20. Ole Miss (1.2%)

 

https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/49782961/2026-college-football-simulations-cfp-conference-title-odds-predictions

[camridleyfan]

I’d take Texas and ou both going thru the sec and then the playoff over Texas tech moping thru the big 12 and having to win 3 games

[TheRoJoShow]

Tech!!!! LMFAO

[CHorn427]

What’s the accuracy of this over recent years?

[Neil Leininger]

These rankings are trash since the advent of the portal.

[Glass Joe]

7 hours ago, CHorn427 said:

What’s the accuracy of this over recent years?

Last season, Connelly’s top 5 “prediction” for the CFB Playoffs were:  Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, Notre Dame, and UGA.  

So, three of those 5 didn’t even make the Playoffs (ND, PSU, and Mich).  To give Connelly some credit, he was one of the very few to correctly predict Clemson would NOT make the Playoffs last season (Joel Klatt predicted a Clemson vs Penn State national championship…LOL).

For me, these silly simulations point out the relative weakness and imbalance between the depth of the SEC and the other conferences.  For example, 3 Big Ten teams are all more likely to make the Playoffs than ANY SEC team (which has an auto bid…LOL).  It reveals that for the top teams of the Big Ten, there is very little risk of losing conference games against many of the lesser Big Ten programs.  By contrast, with the SEC adding a 9th conference game to each schedule, it’s much more likely SEC Playoff contenders will lose conference games and thus fail to make the Playoffs.

Also, a school like Tech effectively gets an automatic bid to the Playoffs because there’s very little chance any other Big 12 school can beat them during conference play.  The Big 12 is effectively a one-team conference for Playoff purposes.  Thus, Tech is a Playoff shoo-in.

It’s important to understand that for all the silliness of Connelly’s simulations, they are not measures of how good or bad a team will be.  Instead, they take a proprietary quantitative-derived metric (S+P) of a team, and then run it against the all other teams on the schedule by the same metric, to get a likelihood of your season-end record.  For this article, it then runs a million simulations of all college FBS football games / records to derive the likelihood of a school making the Playoffs.

[CHorn427]

TAMU's odds of a national title are absolute zero. They possess no QB with the guts to carry them there, and their run game + defense isn't enough to carry them without gutsy/elite QB play. Texas Tech also does not have the requisite trenches on both sides of the ball to seriously compete with the top 10 teams of the SEC and Big10 once they're in the playoffs.  

[Neil Leininger]

From the ESPN article, this was one of his simulations. This is laughably bad.

SEC standings
Missouri 8-1 (11-1)
South Carolina 8-1 (11-1)
Georgia 6-3 (9-3)
Tennessee 6-3 (9-3)
Ole Miss 6-3 (9-3)
Oklahoma 6-3 (8-4)
LSU 5-4 (8-4)
Auburn 5-4 (8-4)
Texas 5-4 (7-5)
Vanderbilt 5-4 (6-6)
Alabama 4-5 (7-5)
Texas A&M 3-6 (6-6)
Kentucky 3-6 (5-7)
Florida 2-7 (4-8)
Mississippi State 1-8 (3-9)
Arkansas 0-9 (2-10)

[Tuco Ramirez]

ESPN is turning into the Onion.