The 12-team College Football Playoff gives teams more margin for error than ever before, but we’re less than halfway through the season and that margin already shrunk dramatically for some of the biggest teams in the sport. The beauty of college football is you never truly know what’s going to happen, and the race for the CFP looks completely wide open.
One week ago, Alabama beat Georgia and put itself in pole position, atop the SEC with an important win and tiebreaker over the Dawgs. But now, after Vanderbilt beat No. 1-ranked Alabama on Saturday, that feeling is a whole lot different.
Suddenly, Alabama is 1-1 in SEC play and still has to travel to Tennessee in two weeks and to LSU on Nov. 9. The Tide’s path to the CFP doesn’t feel like a cakewalk anymore.
PAVIA TO JOHNSON FOR THE TOUCHDOWN pic.twitter.com/UcS9lN4ndf
— Vanderbilt Football (@VandyFootball) October 5, 2024
Meanwhile, Georgia still has Texas, Ole Miss and Tennessee on its schedule. Things aren’t much easier for the Longhorns. Oh, and Texas A&M is 3-0 in SEC play and beat a top-10 Missouri team 41-10 on Saturday.
Elsewhere, Notre Dame is still carrying a loss to Northern Illinois on its resume, a top-25 UNLV team lost to Syracuse on Friday night and Ohio State and Oregon meet as undefeated teams next week. There are many more losses to come for teams currently sitting in the top 10.
Buckle up.
Instead of worrying about whether a game’s stakes are the same in the 12-team CFP era, the last few weeks have reminded us any given Saturday can provide an upset that shakes up the season’s outlook. We have no idea what the 12-team field will look like yet — perhaps the lesson of Vanderbilt is we may get more upsets in the expanded CFP era than we expected.
Required reading
(Photo: Carly Mackler / Getty Images)
