Simulating the 2024 NCAA Football Playoff — National Championship
The simulator has correctly predicted all playoff games.
Opinion polls are just that: opinions, subjective value carrying little worth. Each week this system identified the Top FBS college football programs in terms of objective performance against strength of schedule (PASS), scoring tempo (sTem), and a true win percentage (tWin%). To learn more, check out the season kickoff, and last year’s primer. As the 2024 season progressed these objective ranks were compared against the opinions of the College Football Playoff committee. Follow me over at BlueSky!
After two exciting semifinal matchups, the college football National Championship game is upon us. The simulator has now correctly predicted all ten playoff outcomes, leading us to this point where Notre Dame will take the field against Ohio State. By this point it seems a bit silly to think of these teams as being seeded 7th and 8th when they were the two top performing teams at the start of the playoff.
Even in a 4-team playoff the CFP committee was rarely able to select the best four teams, let alone put them in the correct order. It was always going to be too big of an ask for that same inherently biased panel to nail the seeding of a 12-team football tournament. That did create more “upsets”, if going by those opinion-generated seedings, where the higher won just four of the ten games (All in the first round). By comparison the objective on-field numbers saw the higher rated PASS team win eight of the ten games, with Penn State’s two wins accounting for both of the upsets.
The PASS Top 25
As with last week, non-playoff bowl games are excluded from these latest changes in PASS rankings. Sitting players, coaching staff changes, and rosters do not reflect the same qualities as they did throughout the season. Their inclusion could taint the overall data pool for the playoff teams and their performance.
If this is your first time here, you may be surprised to see the Fighting Irish rank higher than the Buckeyes. Wins aren’t everything, but they do matter as component of this formula: Notre Dame’s ahead in that column. Though, Ohio State has closed the gap in performance — it should be noted that climbing higher while carrying more losses can reveal a dangerous team. A team like Louisville or South Carolina may have been better poised to notch a playoff win where Clemson or Tennessee could not.
Seeing these kinds of trends emerge over the past few seasons, I may want to evaluate what this ranking looks like without wins for comparison’s sake. I would not expect that comparison to be more accurate for the prediction of games, under the assumption that wins do matter and should always be an integral piece of any ranking formula.
The Playoff Games — Semifinal Results
Here are the results of last week’s games, where the dots represent the actual score along the projection curve.
Notre Dame 27, Penn State 24
The simulator projected an average score of Notre Dame 28, Penn State 23. It came closer on this game than any other in the playoff, off by that one point for each team. In terms of the projection curve, these two teams were near their apex of projected outcome while performing on the positive side of it.
The Nittany Lions were certainly this playoff’s most unconventional team, possessing an offense that managed to under-perform an opponent’s average yardage against (SMU), and one that failed to connect on a single pass to a wide receiver (ND). Their ability to manufacture points off of turnovers was a testament to how Penn State was able to stay ahead on projection curves.
Ohio State 28, Texas 14
Neither the Longhorns or Buckeyes were very far off from the peak of their scoring likelihood, but Ohio State once again stifled its opponent and held Texas to the negative side of that apex. This was OSU’s most limiting defensive performance of the playoff, as Tennessee and Oregon both ended up almost exactly at the apex of their curves. It’s also OSU’s least drastic scoring performance, as they were far out in front on their projection curve in those two earlier games.
The simulator thought the average score for this game would be Ohio State 25, Texas 21. That’s not too far off for projecting the Buckeyes, but the Longhorns would underperform while still being well within their expected scoring range. I’m still imagining how far off this all could’ve looked if those flurries of activity at the end of each half hadn’t happened.
The National Championship
This is it! We’re finally here and it’s exactly what we expected.
Each game was simulated using a head-to-head matchup of PASS / sTem data on both sides of the ball. Five hundred simulations of each game reveal an average score, points ceiling & floor, projected yards, and track scoring likelihood. Vegas odds for comparison are as of 5:00PM EST on Jan. 17th.
Notre Dame VS Ohio State
PASS: #1 Notre Dame 68.304 // #2 Ohio State 66.926
sTem: #3 Notre Dame 0.361 // #1 Ohio State 0.379
Avg. Score/Total: Notre Dame 24 Ohio State 25 // Total 49
Ceiling/Floor: Notre Dame 51 | 0 // Ohio State 55 | 0
Projected Yds: Notre Dame 303 // Ohio State 365
Vegas says: Ohio State (-9.5)
Simulation odds: Notre Dame 49.0% // Ohio State 51.0%
This isn’t a true coin flip, and isn’t even the closest game the simulator has produced in this playoff (That honor goes to Penn State/SMU). But it’s not far off, and is not the type of game that makes for very confident betting. Ohio State is ahead by just a nose, despite a pretty generous Vegas spread.
This game went to overtime 3.3% of the time, and the 51% win rate for Ohio State translated there, as well. To see if that line held true under more simulations, well, it did. In 5000 simulations, the Buckeyes won 85 of the 165 overtimes.
Ohio State fans will like:
- That they’ve taken over as the team with the most productive scoring tempo (sTem). After last week’s games, Notre Dame vacated that crown and the Buckeyes were able to grab it, despite their own tempo falling as well. The team with the higher sTem value won 69.61% of games this season.
- The points and yards projections are still strong despite facing the #2 ranked defense, a week after explosive plays helped overcome the #4-ranked Texas defense.
- The PASS momentum of the Buckeyes has a great trajectory despite the slowdown in overall performance against Texas.
Notre Dame fans will like:
- Like their previous playoff games, the Fighting Irish seem to rule the outliers. The two biggest blowouts the simulator produced (48–0, 47–0) both belonged to the Irish.
- They’ve won games with less offensive yards than their opponent four times this year.
- The balancing of the odds. With every passing game, I’m feeling the weight of the simulator growing heavier from its perfect record, and have been expecting the other shoe to drop.
So that’s it. It’s been a heck of a season. As we all adjust to this new, longer college football calendar, I may break for a while longer following this game, but will be posting final rankings and thoughts on the year in the near future. Good luck to your team (Or whoever you’re rooting/not rooting for), on any wagers you might make, and I hope your gametime will be a great time.
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