College football's postseason picture is already taking shape -- at least scribbled on my in-house whiteboard with win-loss projections for 138 FBS teams across 10 conferences. This is my favorite time of the year, with the 2026 season approaching, an opportunity to project all 43 bowl games extremely early, including the matchups that will define the College Football Playoff. The 12-team field has created a greater margin for error among national championship contenders, but preseason expectations still carry weight when separating the sport's elite from everyone else.
Ohio State, Oregon and Notre Dame headline the early title conversation, while several dark-horse threats are positioned to crash the party. Beyond the playoff, these projections forecast landing spots for every bowl-eligible team and spotlight potential clashes between programs from across the Power Four and Group of Six. There will be surprise contenders, disappointing preseason favorites and inevitable postseason chaos, but this is our best August look at how college football's road to the national championship could unfold during bowl season this winter.
AP poll history suggests there's almost always a preseason top-10 team that finishes the season unranked. The hard part is predicting which team it will be this fall. I'm projecting seven of the preseason top 10 to make the playoff, with a couple of SEC teams not in this early bracket in the middle of a three-loss logjam in the league standings.
Clemson (2024) and Alabama (2025) are the only teams that have lost three games prior to the selection committee's final vote and still received a CFP berth. Alabama got there last season after its third loss came in the conference title game, while Clemson was awarded a spot as an auto-qualifier after winning the ACC. For now, until we see further expansion, college football's 12-team playoff format includes five automatic bids for the highest-ranked conference champions and seven at-large bids determined by the selection committee's final top 12.
I was the only voter to rank Miami No. 1 in our CBS Sports 138 rankings earlier this summer, and only one AP voter agreed in the preseason poll. Planting my flag in Coral Gables in this preseason projection was a no-brainer for me, considering who the Hurricanes signed in the transfer portal, the schedule's favorability, and staff continuity under Mario Cristobal. This is only one man's educated guess, but Miami at Notre Dame at Nov. 7 will be one of college football's regular-season games of the year and will determine which team is unbeaten and ranked No. 1 coming down the stretch.
I battled inner turmoil with the squads seeded in the 4-6 range of this projection, which was honestly the toughest stretch to call. We can't assume Texas Tech, my pick to win the Big 12, will automatically be viewed more favorably by the selection committee over a one-loss Notre Dame -- whose projected lone blemish comes to No. 1 and unbeaten Miami -- or a two-loss Georgia. The only justifiable case for the Red Raiders locking in a top-4 seed comes if they win the Big 12 as an unbeaten.
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