Seth Walder from ESPN Analytics released a new metric for predicting the four teams who will make the College Football Playoff: The Playoff Predictor.
In short, ESPN Analytics isolated five factors that they believe offer the best indication of the teams that will make the College Football Playoff. Those factors are:
- Strength of Record
- FPI
- Number of Losses
- Conference Championships
- Independent Status
You can read more about the algorithms used by ESPN Analytics in the link above. But the end result of their number-crunching was that Notre Dame has a 42% chance of making the College Football Playoff this year.