2024 College Football Playoff Projections and Pool Pick Strategy

We provide projected odds for each team in the 2024 College Football Playoffs and go through some strategy thoughts for Playoff Pools.

We cover plans and backup plans for CFB Playoff Pools (Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire)

Until this season, college football bowl pools have always involved knowing nearly all the matchups in advance. The only game that wasn’t set by the time pools started was the national championship.

This year, the new College Football Playoff format gives us our first taste of more of a bracket-style projection of matchups. In the past, the only projecting you had to do was to pick the two semifinalist winners and then the national champ. If you are in a pool this year that requires you to pick the winner at each point in the CFP bracket correctly before any games have started, there are now more combinations to consider.

In this article, we will present our projections for the College Football Playoffs, with round-by-round advancement odds for each team, and then provide some strategy thoughts for some pool types where the individual winners and projections could be important.

Here are the pool types and advice covered below:

• Bowl pools where you must pick the winners of individual playoff games before bowls begin, with fixed point values;
• Bowl pools where you must pick the winners of individual playoff games before bowls begin, and you assign confidence points;
• Playoff bracket contest type of pools;
• Playoff confidence point pools.

2024 College Football Playoffs Pools: Round-By-Round Advancement Odds

The 2024 College Football Playoffs features a 12-team format where the four top conference winners get byes into the quarterfinals, and eight other teams are matched up in the first round, at home sites for the better seed.

Here are the current byes and matchups:

• #1 Oregon
• #2 Georgia
• #3 Boise State
• #4 Arizona State
• #5 Texas vs. #12 Clemson
• #6 Penn State vs. #11 SMU
• #7 Notre Dame vs. #10 Indiana
• #8 Ohio State vs. #9 Tennessee

Here are the projected Round-by-Round Advancement Odds for each of those 12 teams. We’ll use these projections to inform our advice for the various pool types.