Livescore
College football will do its best college basketball impression beginning this weekend as the College Football Playoff begins in earnest Friday. The first-ever 12-team field will be featured NCAA Tournament-style with its own fancy little bracket in a single-elimination format.
It’s not quite a 68-team bracket, but it’s got potential to produce plenty of chaos similar to March Madness — might I pitch December of Disarray?! — which is where we college hoops experts specialize
As such, I did my best Ron Burgundy impersonation and grabbed my conch shell to assemble the big guns who are most familiar with bracket play and single-elimination tournaments like the NCAA Tournament. The CBS Sports college basketball team responded by sending me their brackets with picks for every game.
Let’s have a look now at how the hoops team sees the first-ever 12-team College Football Playoff bracket playing out.
College Football Playoff bracket picks
Gary Parrish
Oregon has been and still is the sport’s best team — one with a 13-0 record featuring victories over the schools that are seeded sixth (Penn State) and eighth (Ohio State) in the first ever 12-team College Football Playoff.
The Ducks are just three more wins away from a national title.
I think they’ll get it.
And, to get it, I believe they’ll eliminate Ohio State, Arizona State and Georgia (in that order) to finish 16-0 and remove themselves from the list of best programs to never win a national championship. The hypothetical matchup with Arizona State in the semifinals would be especially cool, in part because it would pit two former Memphis assistants — Oregon’s Dan Lanning and Arizona State’s Kenny Dillingham — against each other. Both men worked for Mike Norvell at Memphis in 2016 and 2017 and have gone on to establish themselves as two of the sport’s brightest young coaches. Considering Lanning, 38, has already passed on big opportunities, and Dillingham, 34, is an ASU graduate, there are reasons to believe they’ll remain where they’re at and have the Ducks and Sun Devils back on this stage for many years to come.
Matt Norlander
Well, well, well. High-level college football’s finally come around to a true bracket championship. Welcome to the real world; you’re only about 70 years late.
The thing I’m most looking forward to seeing play out is the upset element that comes with single-elimination play in a bigger bracket. It’s hard for most to see how Clemson or SMU would win in the first round, or how Arizona State, Boise State or Notre Dame could make a deep run. But there’s going to be at least one dramatic, unexpected moment that comes about over the next month, and I can’t wait to see how it develops.
As for my bracket: I did a lot of guessing. Folks, I cover college basketball. I enjoy college football, and watch it regularly, but I couldn’t tell you one player on Boise State outside of Ashton Jeanty. (Thus, naturally, ‘ve got the Broncos beating Penn State.) If there’s one bracket-picking rule I always abide by, it’s this: BE BOLD. So I’m picking Notre Dame to win it all. I like the idea of the first 12-team CFP champion to be a historic power in the sport — that’d be proper. The fact it could happen while said team also lost a home game in the same season to Northern Illinois is also highly appealing. As much as Oregon is tempting, it won’t play 16 games and win every one.
Kyle Boone
The only team to take down Texas this season did so twice. And that was Georgia, which did so by combining for 13 sacks in its two wins over the Longhorns, pressuring Quinn Ewers into errant throws and making him see ghosts like Sam Darnold. (The Jets version of Darnold, not the Panthers or Vikings version.)
My pick in Texas is a placement of faith that Steve Sarkisian can do enough schematically to keep Ewers off the turf and in relatively clean pockets to run the offense. When he has time to dissect defenses and make throws, he has the arm and the weapons around him both in the backfield and in the receiving corps to score enough points to win any game.
Texas might not — and probably doesn’t — even need Ewers to turn into Cardale Jones this postseason to hoist the trophy, either. Its defense is allowing the second-fewest points and total yards per game this season, That is this team’s strength. Playing complementary offense and squeezing teams on defense is a formula that has worked for Texas this season and will be enough to allow for a run that ends in a championship.
Cameron Salerno
Oregon’s path to the national title game won’t be easy. A matchup against the winner of Tennessee vs. Ohio State in the Rose Bowl and potentially Texas in the semifinals is brutal. The Ducks have been the best team in the sport for most of the season, and it would be fitting for Dan Lanning’s program to win the inaugural 12-team CFP. As for the rest of my bracket, I have SMU upsetting Penn State in Happy Valley in the first round and Boise State making a run in the semifinals on the other side of the bracket. When it’s all said and done, Oregon will beat Notre Dame to claim the school’s first national title.
Isaac Trotter
Stars matter in college football recruiting, and I used it early and often in the 3 minutes I spent filling out my College Football Playoff bracket.
247Sports’ Bud Elliott created the Blue-Chip Ratio in 2013 (you can read more about it here), which has been a measuring stick to separate the big dawgs from the rest of the pack in the chase for a national title. Per Elliot: “A college football team needs to sign more four- and five-star recruits than two- and three-star players over the previous four recruiting classes.” When you factor in transfers, seven teams in the CFP made the cut in the Blue-Chip Ratio: Ohio State, Georgia, Oregon, Texas, Clemson, Notre Dame and Penn State.
That’s partly why I picked Texas, Oregon, Penn State and Georgia to advance to the semifinals. Maybe I’m a tad Texas-pilled by my boss, who is a massive UT fan (don’t ask him about Rodney Terry), but I’ll ride with Steve Sarkisian and the boys to get red-hot from the No. 5 seed slot and advance all the way to the finals against Georgia. Beating the same team three times is almost impossible in basketball. That has to correlate in football … right?
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