How a power conference champion could get left out of the College Football Playoff

Yes, it's possible that one-loss Boise State and undefeated Army could keep the Big 12 or ACC title-winner out of the 12-team field. Let's take a look at how.

In four weeks, the long-awaited inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff bracket will be filled out, with a dozen teams earning the opportunity to carry their national championship aspirations with them for at least another handful of days.

Whoever receives those coveted spots will be the subject of intense debate and even anger, something we know because what exists solely as a made-for-TV product – the weekly release of the playoff committee’s rankings – already elicits those feelings.

Since the criteria for the event was first established, there have been some underlying assumptions that often shape the conversations around the expanded playoff. The playoff guarantees inclusion to the five highest-rated conference champions, with the top four teams from that quintet earning first-round byes. The final seven spots go to the highest-rated non-conference champions, as determined by the playoff’s selection committee.

The conventional wisdom has been that in most years, those top four slots will go to the champions of the Power Four conferences, which, given how this sport functions, isn’t a bad prediction. That may not be the case this year, though, as Boise State, the current Group of Five representative, is No. 13 in the most recent rankings, putting it within striking distance of ACC flagbearer Miami at No. 9.

There’s an even bigger blind spot in these playoff discussions. It’s not that a major conference champion might not receive one of those precious byes. It’s that it might not make the field at all.

As the regular season nears its end, it’s a possibility that looms.

In 2014, the year of the first College Football Playoff, the Big 12 failed to get a team into what was then a four-team field. The old system, even more than the new one, was designed to generate furor, as there were four spots for a sport that had five major conferences at the time. In the Big 12’s case, it had a pair of 11-1 teams in Baylor and TCU that were left out, neither of which were the conference champion because what was then a 10-team league that played a true round robin and built an entire ad campaign around having “One True Champion” didn’t stage a conference championship game.

The conference rebounded, instituting a conference title game and sending one of its teams to the playoff in six of the following nine years, but an even bigger gut punch may await for it a decade after the Baylor and TCU snubs. For all the excitement and unpredictability the conference has offered in the first year of its 16-school reconfiguration, it has a dearth of top-tier teams, with No. 6 BYU the league’s lone soldier among the top 15 teams in the latest playoff rankings. Every Big 12 team beyond the Cougars has at least two losses this season, which has basically thrust those squads into a position of needing to win out and win the conference title game to make the playoff.

The Big 12 is not alone in this precarious position, either. The aforementioned ACC has two teams with fewer than two losses and unlike BYU, both of those squads, No. 9 Miami and No. 14 SMU, have one loss apiece and thus a smaller margin for error.

Is it probable that the champion from either of those conferences misses out on the playoff? Absolutely not. But in mid-November, the path at least exists for two of the five spots reserved for conference champions to come from the Group of Five leagues.

How, exactly, could that once-unthinkable scenario come to fruition? Let’s take a look:

Boise State (probably) needs to win out

Ashton Jeanty and the Broncos are the highest-rated Group of Five team right now, with an 8-1 record and the No. 13 spot in the most recent playoff rankings, only four spots behind ACC-leading Miami. There’s at least a chance that if Boise State wins out – and with its lone loss coming by three on the road to No. 1 Oregon – it will leapfrog one of the Power Four champions and claim a coveted first-round bye.

The road to that point is pretty navigable. The Broncos will face a test this weekend when they play a much-improved 6-3 San Jose State team on the road, but after that, it’s 2-7 Wyoming and 4-5 Oregon State, neither of which should pose a challenge, and a date with, as of now, 6-3 Colorado State in the Mountain West title game.

Army (definitely) needs to win out

While rival Navy has fallen off a bit in recent weeks, losing two of its past three after a 6-0 start, the Black Knights are one of just four undefeated teams remaining at the FBS level. They have three regular-season games remaining, but one of those is the annual matchup with Navy, which will come one week after the playoff bracket is determined and thus, oddly, won’t have any impact on the national championship race.