Next Tuesday, the College Football Playoff committee will release its first rankings. Saturday is the last chance to make an impression, and the playoff picture is crowded.
Every game counts the same in the standings. Some count more in the committee room.
Saturday is the final slate before the College Football Playoff selection committee releases its first rankings of the season on Tuesday night, Nov. 3. The committee will rank teams off nine weeks of work, and for some of them this Saturday is the last line on the résumé before those rankings come out.
And the picture is crowded. Three teams are still unbeaten: Miami, Utah and UCLA. The SEC doesn't have a single unbeaten team left. And under this year's new rules, winning your conference matters more than it did a year ago.
The new rules, quickly
The playoff is still 12 teams, but the automatic bids work differently this season. The champions of the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC each get a guaranteed spot. One more spot goes to the highest-ranked champion from the other six conferences: the American, Conference USA, the MAC, the Mountain West, the Pac-12 and the Sun Belt. Notre Dame is guaranteed a spot if it finishes in the top 12. The rest are at-large bids.
The top four seeds get first-round byes, whether or not they're conference champions. Seeds 5 through 8 host first-round games on campus.
If the playoff started today
The committee hasn't spoken yet, so we used the Oct. 25 AP poll as a stand-in and let the highest-ranked team in each conference act as its champion. Here's how the field would look.
No. 1 Miami, No. 2 Ohio State, No. 3 Georgia and No. 4 Indiana would get byes. Notre Dame, at No. 5, is in on its top-12 guarantee and would host No. 20 Boise State, which takes the spot reserved for the best champion outside the Power 4. Utah, the Big 12's stand-in champion, would host Texas. UCLA would host Alabama, and BYU would host Kentucky.
That's four SEC teams, three from the Big Ten, two from the Big 12, one from the ACC, Notre Dame and Boise State.
The first four out would be No. 12 Ole Miss, No. 13 Texas Tech, No. 14 Wake Forest and No. 15 LSU. Ole Miss is the clearest casualty of the new rules. It's ranked inside the top 12, but Boise State's guaranteed bid pushes it out.
Saturday's biggest stakes
The byes are on the line in the late afternoon. No. 3 Georgia plays No. 17 Florida in Atlanta at 3:30 p.m. on ABC. Georgia is one of only two SEC teams with one loss, along with Kentucky. A Florida win would leave Kentucky as the SEC's only one-loss team and hand the committee a mess to sort out. At the same time, No. 4 Indiana, which holds the last bye, hosts a Minnesota team that's 3-1 in the Big Ten.
The unbeatens play at night. No. 2 Ohio State goes to USC at 7:30 p.m. on NBC, and No. 1 Miami plays at North Carolina at the same time on ABC. Miami is the only unbeaten team in the ACC, and the Tar Heels are coming off a loss to Syracuse. Ohio State is 4-0 in the Big Ten, but a road loss in Los Angeles could cost it a top-two seed.
The Big 12 is a race for one guaranteed spot. No. 6 Utah is the league's only unbeaten team at 4-0 and plays at Cincinnati, which just beat Texas Tech. Behind Utah, four teams are 3-1 in league play. Two of them, No. 13 Texas Tech and No. 22 Arizona, play each other at noon. The loser falls a full game behind Utah. No. 8 BYU, also 3-1, hosts Arizona State after its double-overtime loss to UCF.
The bubble is all SEC. No. 11 Texas, which jumped eight spots after beating Ole Miss, is the last team in our projection and hosts Mississippi State. Ole Miss, the first team out, hosts Auburn. Both need to win, and Ole Miss needs help.
The guaranteed spot for everyone else. No. 20 Boise State, the highest-ranked team outside the Power 4, closes the night against Texas State at 10 p.m. on The CW.
Some of the biggest names in the picture are off this week. No. 9 Kentucky and No. 10 Alabama are idle before playing big games on Nov. 7: Kentucky at No. 16 Tennessee and Alabama at No. 15 LSU.
What it means
The first rankings aren't the final rankings. Selection Day isn't until Dec. 6, and there are five weeks of football left.
But first impressions matter, especially with byes and home games at stake. By Tuesday night, at least one of Saturday's favorites will probably have lost, a bubble team will have played its way in, and the committee's first look will tell us which résumés it values most. That's college football in November. Nothing is settled, and every Saturday rewrites the bracket.
About the data: The projection uses the AP Top 25 released Oct. 25, 2026, as a stand-in for the selection committee and treats the highest-ranked team in each conference as its champion. It is not a prediction of the committee's rankings. Records, rankings, and kickoff times come from CBS Sports' AP poll and conference standings pages. The 2026-27 playoff format is from National Football Post.