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Let’s be real: The Week 2 college football slate’s impact on the playoff race is … minimal.
Of the 82 contests featuring FBS teams, there are only two games — two! — in which both teams have College Football Playoff leverage of at least 1%, according to the Allstate Playoff Predictor. In other words, there are just two games in which the difference in chance to reach the playoff with a win and with a loss exceeds 1%.
Alabama at Texas is the obvious candidate with legitimate playoff leverage for each team — though the Crimson Tide have an 82% chance to win, per ESPN’s Football Power Index. The other game is Baylor at BYU, in which the Cougars squeak in with a single percentage point of playoff leverage in what should be a tighter affair (FPI makes Baylor a 58% favorite).
That’s it. There are other games that are consequential in the sense that they could have an impact on the playoff race if the contending favorite loses.
Again, in other words — outside of the two contests mentioned at the top — this week is all about teams defending their playoff probabilities and paths. Let’s talk about those two games, what other teams could trip up in Week 2 and what the impact would be. We’ll ignore those with a 90+% chance to win and focus on the at least slightly feasible losses.
Alabama (82% chance to win) at Texas
Alabama playoff leverage: 19%
Texas playoff leverage: 14%
FPI is all about the Longhorns, at least relatively. Though Texas is nowhere to be found among the AP Top 25, our predictive model is a believer, making Texas the seventh-best team in the country going forward. While FPI isn’t exactly expecting a close outcome (it favors the Crimson Tide by 12.8 points), it does expect a closer contest than Caesars Sportsbook, which has Alabama as a 20-point favorite.
An Alabama loss would drop the Crimson Tide to a 68% chance to reach the playoff, putting them behind only Ohio State and Georgia but still ahead of Clemson. It would also rocket Texas up to a 23% chance to…
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Source : espn
