The College Football Playoff Risk board, 2015 edition
One turn remains before the Playoff. Here’s how the game’s armies stand.
Oklahoma has already secured one of the four most critical continents for itself, allowing the reformed OU republic to spend its turn on conference championship Saturday reaping the rewards of its conquest as every other top contender has to continue battling.
The Sooners’ position means they’re unlikely to enter the Playoff ranked No. 1 or 2, since the armies that conquer Asia, North America and Europe will each have more power. This means the blustering President Stoops’ next attack could come from any direction, depending on whether the pecking order dictates war against Clemson, Alabama, the Big Ten champion, or other next.
Iowa and Michigan State battle on Saturday for control of the traditional Old World power, the Big Ten. Trench warfare will be reborn as Kaiser Ferentz and Generalissimo Dantonio launch thunderous punts at each other from heavy artillery positions, neither side gaining an inch, neither side lacking in scholarship that it would like to tell you about.
The winner claims one of the map’s three most useful continents, then must immediately reroute its armies along rail lines to prepare for invasion in any of three directions.
The North Carolina Resistance has a real chance to topple one of the game’s two great powers. UNC has been stockpiling cards for this turn’s ACC Championship raid. “The Fedora” and his Tar Heels could strike all the way through to their homeland in the Eastern United States, cutting Clemson in two, thus either taking over as America’s great power or ...
... allowing Stanford or Ohio State to sweep in.
The stone-faced Minister Shaw’s technocratic Cardinal, with a Pac-12 Championship over the perpetually unstable USC to be gained on Saturday, could pivot their lumbering kaiju and take advantage of an astounding collapse by either Clemson or Alabama.
The angry Buckeyes, however, are holed up in a wasteland with no conference championship resources, hoping for massive waves of anarchy rocking half the planet. Billions of voices would cry out for the guidance of Ezekiel Elliott, the young rebel who seized the fading Buckeye throne with the blessing of its weary figurehead, Urban Meyer.
The scattered Florida remnant is shambling and starving by day and shrieking at the stars beneath a pile of scorpions by night, all of which is preferable to enduring the SEC Championship.
The Alabama Empire has signed most of the planet’s population into its overflowing horde. Though the paranoid and heartless Very Tall Dark Lord Saban fears a defection of his top general to Georgia, Georgia is nearly under Saban’s cruel fist anyway.
Owning Australia and most of Asia means the boiling dictator is on the brink of sealing the game’s most profitable chunk of land. But Alabama’s limitless raw resources don’t make it the top superpower.
Clemson has a chance at dominant position, thanks to having so few threats along its external borders. Clemson also employs Captain Watson, the most talented field commander still in commission, save perhaps Oklahoma’s mercenary Captain Mayfield. But the Tigers have a serious outbreak of UNC within their own area.
Still, Brother Dabo’s charismatic apocalypse cult can convert the North Carolina resistance and thus shake off the last of the Ohio State regime in one turn. The American overlord could then watch Europe brawl amongst itself (again) before luring either Oklahoma or the Big Ten champion to an ambush in Miami on New Year’s Eve.
Notre Dame is really cold.
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