College football starts in September with 128 teams and billions of different paths to the playoff. Nearly all of that multiverse has been closed off — on Saturday, it’ll be sealed for good.
There are four major conference titles at stake Saturday, but only two could really cause chaos for the playoff selection committee: those of the SEC and ACC. The Big Ten championship game matters less, from our perspective, because the winner is almost certainly getting in. And the Pac-12 championship only comes into play if Stanford wins and Alabama or Clemson loses (or both).
To break down just how those games could affect the playoff picture, my colleague Jay Boice and I ran 20,000 simulations of FiveThirtyEight’s College Football Playoff model.