College Football Playoff Picture- Week 2 2026

This year, I’ll be providing a weekly update on how my model’s playoff odds have changed from week to week. For now, I’m only going to discuss P4 teams. Modeling the G6 playoff spot is a good bit harder this year now that the G6 representative does not necessarily need to be a conference champion. I’ll build a model for that, but it won’t be until October.

Week 1 was relatively quiet in terms of marquee ranked matchups. We learned a decent amount about a lot of teams, but it was mostly second and third tier contenders rather than the absolute cream of the crop. That means there are relatively few big changes near the top.

My model is generally less confident in the top few teams making the playoffs than the betting market (and that’s reflected in the bets I’ve made). The gap between the top few teams and everyone else is not that big- e.g. Ohio State (2nd in my model) would only be a 6 point favorite on a neutral field against USC (11th in my model). The gap between the top few teams and the next tier has closed a lot in the NIL era- it has become much harder for the Alabamas and Georgias and Ohio States of the world to stack up a lot of depth when those players can freely chase money and playing time elsewhere.

LSU and Clemson are unsurprisingly the biggest movers in playoff odds from the preseason to now. My model was pretty down on LSU and high on Clemson in the preseason, which has been a disaster.

A lot of the rest of the movement is in the ACC. Virginia looked great against NC State and has a light schedule. Miami looks dominant against bad teams. Cal was a pet favorite of mine preseason but looked quite bad against UCLA.

I’d like to highlight a few other teams whose playoff odds are low enough that they didn’t make the graphic but their odds changed considerably. UCLA rose from 2.4% to 5.3%, Arizona State rose from 3.2% to 5.2% and UCF rose from 2.4% to 3.8%.