Official CFP Predictions

We added our official (Model-driven) College Football Playoff predictions in the second version of our State of the Chart magazine, as well as our staff picks.

As part of the State of the Chart magazine purchase, we’ll be releasing updated versions throughout the summer as we get closer. Camps are opening, and the news is starting to roll in. We make hundreds of little tinkers to our charts, which feeds our simulations and model predictions. We ran that simulation (and will do so again), to see where it takes us. We also asked our excellent staff to share their insights on how things will end up by the end of the season.

Again, if you have not yet purchased the magazine, please take a look at our preview. It’s just $9.99, and you’ll get all of the weekly update versions included. Thank you for your support of our work.

2025 Official CFP Predictions

What is a preview magazine without an official projection for the 12-team College Football Playoff? Well, it's not a preview magazine. We will use this space to run through our Model simulations to bring us to the Conference Championship week and then simulate each to come up with our official field and then play it out from there...so, here it is: The official CFBDepth CFP predictions for 2025. We also ask our staff for their predictions, which we will include, along with the non-human Model predictions, that follow here...

Final Top 25 CFP Rankings (regular season)

Based on our simulations, here is how we would rank the top 20 in the CFP rankings heading into the Conference Championship matchups:

Conference Championships

We will now simulate the conference championships to identify our five automatic qualifiers and our top four for the byes.

As you can see, one Model surprise has Hawai'i competing for the Mountain West title. That may surprise some (myself included), but we don't mess with the Model in this case. Texas Tech runs the table in the regular season but falls to Arizona State in the Big XII Championship shootout. There are a few other upsets in the group of five finales, as well. WKU beats host Liberty, and Toledo falls to Miami (OH), despite an undefeated MAC regular season.

We made it through a wild and crazy Conference Championship week, and now it is time to unveil the final College Football Playoff rankings and seedings—first, a refresher on how this works (for now, anyway). The top five conference champions will get automatic bids. That means one group of five conferences, based on our conference ratings (below), will earn a spot. The rest of the seeding comes in via the computers. You can see the regular season rankings on the previous page.

We need to find the top five-rated conferences. For this, we'll use our All-In Rankings (AIR) to determine who gets the automatic bids. We will use the highest average AIR amongst all teams in the Conference. We know the first four, though it's fun to see who comes out on top there, too, but the real test is to see which of the G5 conference champions is going to get into this field. In 2024, it was Boise State. Let's see who it is in 2025...

Now, the fun really starts. We get to set our 12-team bracket with seedings. We got a look at the pre-Conference Championship CFP rankings up above. So, we'll go off of those. We'll start by slotting in the Tulane Green Wave at #12. We'll go back up to the top to get the four 'bye' weeks. The Texas Longhorns are the clear #1 seed, sneaking by the Crimson Tide in the SEC Championship for an undefeated regular season. The Buckeyes threw a wrench into things by beating Penn State, which was the clear #2 heading into CC week. Even with that big win, Ohio State still suffered two losses, albeit to Texas and Penn State, by a combined five points. We still can't put the Buckeyes ahead of the Nittany Lions, and that incredible regular season is enough to secure the #2 seed for the Penn State Nittany Lions. This is where it gets weird…

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