For the first time all college football season, Ohio State is on the outside looking in when it comes to being ranked in the top four of the College Football Playoff rankings.
But it’s close.
The Buckeyes are No. 5, one spot behind a one-loss USC team that has another game to play when it takes on Utah in the Pac-12 Championship game.
Besides that, TCU sits at No. 3 and also has to win one more game against a Kansas State team that gave the Horned Frogs all they could handle in October. The winner will be crowned Big 12 champ. For both USC and TCU, a loss would mean the résumés will be compared against Ohio State’s with a razor-thin margin.
With these sorts of things, we often like to confer with the popular analytics website, FiveThirtyEight, to see what their playoff model thinks Ohio State’s chances of making the College Football Playoff are.
At this point, the number of teams still alive has been pared to five, really, with a very, very outside shot of including Alabama as a sixth team, but that cream-and-crimson ship has likely sailed with the Tide being a two-loss team without a conference championship.
There aren’t a ton of variables in this thing, but here is what FiveThirtyEight says about Ohio State’s chances of making the CFP when looking at a few possible results.
First, we’ll deal with just the top six teams’ straight percentage chances of getting in without taking anything else into consideration.