2026 season

Projected playoff bracket

Built from your picks: conference champions first, then the field of twelve, straight-seeded.

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The projected bracket needs JavaScript

It is built from your own picks, which live in your browser. Most of this site does not: the schedule, every team page, the standings, the polls, the player pages and all 888 matchup previews are plain pages. What needs it is this page, the predictor, the bracket, the scorecard, the live board, the comparison tool, leagues and the leaderboard.

The format

The ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC champions take four automatic bids.
The fifth goes to the highest-ranked team from the American, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, Pac-12 or Sun Belt — whether or not it won its conference. That is new for 2026.
Notre Dame is guaranteed a place if it finishes inside the top twelve.
The remaining seven places are at-large, and go to the power conferences and Notre Dame. This page takes exactly one team from the other six leagues — the automatic bid in rule 2. Ranking a team and selecting it are different acts, and no Group of Five team has ever been given an at-large: Boise State was in for 2024 as Mountain West champion, and the two that got in for 2025 were there on the five-champions rule, which is the rule that was deleted because of them. A second one shows up in first four out, with the reason.
The four highest-ranked teams take the byes, champion or not. The bracket is straight-seeded: 5 plays 12, 6 plays 11, 7 plays 10 and 8 plays 9, on the higher seed's field, Dec 18–19. Quarterfinals and semifinals rotate among the New Year's Six bowls.

What changed, and why this page was wrong. Through 2025 the five automatic bids went to the five highest-ranked conference champions. That is not a formality: in 2025 it put two Group of Five champions in the field — Tulane at eleven and James Madison at twelve — because a five-loss Duke won the ACC and ranked below them. The CFP changed the rule in response, and for 2026 the fifth bid belongs to the highest-ranked Group of Five team, champion or not. An earlier version of this page asserted that two such teams had never both made it. That was false, and it had happened the season before.

A record is read against the schedule that produced it. A 12-0 Sun Belt team and a 12-0 SEC team have the same record and are not the same team. The default order scores a team's rating plus five points for every win it collects above what its own schedule implied — each game's win probability comes from the two ratings and home field, so beating nobody is worth nothing and going 11-1 through the SEC is worth a lot. The previous version scored win percentage times 100 plus the rating, which put a perfect record's value at 100 points on a scale whose entire spread is 48: under chalk it seeded three Group of Six teams, two of them at six and seven. You can still order by projected record alone, which ignores schedule strength on purpose, or by the rating alone.

This is not a committee forecast. The selection committee ranks teams by judgment. This page needs an order it can actually derive. Two reasonable rules produce two different brackets, which is the honest shape of the problem.

Change the picks

Every conference's games are pickable on its predictor page. The same picks drive this bracket, and this browser remembers them. Copy share link on a predictor page makes a link that reproduces them for somebody else.