The College Football Playoff’s field of four was unveiled Sunday. Those teams will meet in semifinals on New Year’s Day, and the winners will play for the national championship in Atlanta on Jan. 8.
Full College Football Playoff bracket and schedule revealed
Here are the four teams who’ll be playing in college football’s top-level semifinals and where they’re headed.
Marvin Gentry-USA TODAY Sports
Rose Bowl semifinal, Pasadena: No. 2 Oklahoma vs. No. 3 Georgia
Sugar Bowl semifinal, New Orleans: No. 1 Clemson vs. No. 4 Alabama
Both games will be on Jan. 1, the Rose at 5:10 p.m. ET and the Sugar at 8:45 p.m. ET.
Both will be on ESPN and WatchESPN.
The National Championship awaits the semifinal winners. This year that’s at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the home of the Atlanta Falcons, at 8 p.m. ET on Monday, Jan. 9.
Georgia, Oklahoma, and Clemson punched their tickets with their wins in conference title games. The fourth spot was the big question mark, as a two-loss Ohio State won the Big Ten by beating Wisconsin in Indianapolis, but a one-loss Alabama had an argument with a stronger resume. A solid breakdown of their resumes can be found here.
How were the participants picked?
All teams in Division I’s FBS are technically eligible to make the Playoff. Starting in midseason, the Playoff’s selection committee ranks the country’s teams from one through 25 each week. At the end of the season, the four highest-ranked teams fill out the four Playoff spots.
The committee has 13 members. These are mostly athletic administrators and former coaches.
“Ranking football teams is an art, not a science,” the committee says. But it has a few criteria it uses to differentiate teams that it thinks are of similar quality:
- Conference titles. This year’s race, like last year’s, presents some interesting questions about how much conference titles matter. Bama doesn’t have one.
- Strength of schedule. You can measure schedule strength in a bunch of ways. The committee has cited wins against .500-plus teams and wins against ranked teams, in the few times members have actually discussed their metrics.
- Head-to-head results. Oklahoma beat Ohio State, for example.
- Games against common opponents (“without incenting margin of victory”). The committee claims it otherwise doesn’t pay much attention to raw scoring margins, believe it or not, making it sort of like the BCS’s formulas.
Which bowl games are part of the Playoff?
They rotate every year. The six top-tier bowl games are known as the New Year’s Six. (In another era, these used to be most of the BCS bowls.) The NY6 is made up of the Rose, Sugar, Peach, Fiesta, Cotton and Orange bowls.
Every year, two of the New Year’s games become Playoff semifinals. This year, they’re the Rose (in Pasadena, Calif.) and Sugar (in New Orleans).
The other four major bowls (and the other 33 in general) will also be announced throughout Sunday.
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