“Who’s In?”
It’s the slogan that has reverberated every August since 2014. As 130 teams prepare to kick off each college football season, there is manufactured perception that late August to early December is a three-and-a-half month grind for all 130 teams to end up in the 4-team College Football Playoff. Except, seven years of College Football Playoff evidence suggest that roughly half of teams in the sport are eliminated from contention before the season even kicks off.
When UCF won 25-straight games and couldn’t even sniff the top 6, or when a 1-loss Louisiana lagged nine spots in the rankings behind a 3-loss Iowa State team that they beat by 17, fans of teams in the American Conference and Sun Belt, among others, began to question the possibility of appearing in the College Football Playoff.