Oregon at #5 in Penultimate 2025 College Football Playoff Rankings

Today is the last rankings drop from the committee before the conference championship games this coming weekend and Selection Sunday on December 7th. Oregon moved up to #5 after their win over rival Washington, with fellow Big Ten members Ohio State and Indiana at the top two spots, Georgia at #3, and Texas Tech at #4:

After last year’s experience, much has been made about the somewhat perverse incentives of the expanded playoff structure making the #5 spot ideal – no conference championship game to plan for or create additional injuries, but no long layoff either, and facing a low-ranked opponent — one of teams that are pulled up to a higher seeding than their actual ranking due to agreements with the conferences in the first-round game at their home stadium. This setup allowed what turned out to be a pretty milquetoast 2024 Penn State team to cruise to the semifinals and fool a lot of people into thinking they were on a glide path to a national championship the following season.

Oregon therefore might like to avoid a scenario in which some chaos occurs and they get pulled up a spot and into a first-round bye, as the top four seeds receive. That seems unlikely, as the committee has stated conference championship losers won’t be punished and the four seeds ahead of them are all in their conference’s championship game (though who knows whether the committee is being perfectly truthful about that), however it’s possible that something awful like a quarterback injury happens during the CCG which causes the committee to re-evaluate the seeding, as happened with undefeated Florida State in 2023.

Regardless, there’s too much of a gap between any of the possible usurpers who are below Oregon but might win a P4 CCG — Alabama, BYU, Virginia (and technically Duke, I suppose) — to push the Ducks out of the playoffs even with total chaos. FanDuel rates all three Big Ten teams as mortal locks to make the playoffs and gives Oregon at +1000 to win the National Championship, with Ohio State and Indiana at +185 and +380 respectively.

Of the probable game outcome possibilities, the least favorable to Oregon in my opinion would be an Alabama win and a Texas Tech win – that leaves no room to move up but a possibility of Alabama (and the team that beat Alabama, Oklahoma, and the team that beat the team that beat Oklahoma, Ole Miss) moving up and bumping Oregon out of the favorable #5 catbird seat.