Simulating the 2025 College Football Regular Season 5000 Times

5000 runs! Who ends up at the top?

Last article we previewed the college football season by creating our preseason consensus power ratings. Now that we have those ratings, we can use those to simulate the college football season 5000 times.

Once those simulations are ran, we can see how many wins a team averages per simulation, how often they win their conference championship, and how often they are involved in the CFB playoff race (ill explain later why im not calling it “odds to make the playoff”). As a quick reminder for those that didn’t see the consensus preseason ratings, here is where we stand heading into the season:

Its awesome to see no team establishing themselves as the clear frontrunner heading into the season. Especially considering most of the teams at the top (Alabama, Texas, Georgia, Notre Dame, Oregon) are breaking in relatively new or brand new QBs.

We will learn a little bit about Texas and Ohio State as they are set to play each other in Columbus week 1 of the season. We also get to see Notre Dame take on fellow tier mates Miami and Texas A&M to start off the season. Of course I have to mention LSU and Clemson kicking off the season against each other as well. After an exciting start to the season, we should some teams separate themselves from each other leading to a clear frontrunner heading into October.

Now that we have these ratings, we can use these to simulate schedules 5000 times. In order to do this, these power ratings were transformed into ELO ratings (commonly used to rank chess players) which will then give us an easy way to calculate the odds a team will beat another team. Those odds are then used to determine who “wins” that matchup, and that is continued throughout the season 5000 times.

Average Simulation Wins vs. Average Vegas Win Totals

After 5000 simulations, we have average wins for each team which we can compare to what the sportsbooks are currently offering in order to see who we are higher or lower on then the betting market. For the most part, our simulated wins are pretty close to what the betting market is saying, which is a good thing as the betting market is one of the best pieces of information we have (even if you don’t bet I would highly recommend keeping up with betting lines!).

These are the teams that the simulations were the highest on in relation to the sports betting market. As you can see, Virginia Tech, BYU and Florida Atlantic won 0.8 more games on average than the average sportsbook win total. For the most part these teams aren’t really moving up that much in the tiers of college football, with the exception of Jacksonville State that goes from missing out on a bowl at 5.4 to just sneaking into a December game with 6.1 based on our simulations.

On the other side, these are the teams the simulations were lower on compared to the sportsbooks. Its interesting because if you asked me to go with my gut I would be high on Louisville, Michigan State and LSU. I guess in the eyes of the simulation QBs like Aiden Chiles (Michigan State) don’t hit the development step they need to take, while maybe Miller Moss (Louisville) doesn’t continue the Jeff Brohm streaks of solid finds in the transfer portal.

Teams In Contention For The Conference Title

During the simulations I had the top two teams in record (Head to head as the first tiebreaker followed by top ELO rating, so the tiebreakers are not 100% accurate) face off in a conference championship. The winner of that game was deemed the conference champion and given an automatic berth in the CFB Playoffs.

When looking the Power 4 teams who won the conference championship 10% or more times, we can see each conference in the Power 4 has at least three teams with a realistic shot at reaching championship week. Im kind of surprised at the simulations liking Kansas State a lot more than the other Big 12 teams. If you look at “odds to win the conference title” on a site like Fanduel, you can see the Wildcats as only a slight favorite to take home the title over Arizona State, Utah and Baylor.

Over in the land of the Group of 5, we can see the Mountain West (Boise State) and Conference USA (Liberty) have a team that is the team to beat, followed by a team that is pretty far behind in the conference race. The American conference (formally American Athletic), which looks to be the conference that could potentially steal the playoff berth from Boise State and the Mountain West, looks to be one of the tightest conference races in the game.

Memphis and Tulane are injecting a ton of transfer portal players into their offense (including at the QB position), while Navy looks to build on their 24th ranked (EPA/Play) offense with star QB Blake Horvath. Will we see a triple option service academy line it up in the playoffs?

Best Odds Of Being In CFB Playoff Race

I am hesitating to calling these “Odds to make the college football playoff” as the playoff still involves a level of humans voting in teams to make up the at large spots. So in that case, Id like to think of these odds as “odds to be in the playoff race at the end of the regular season”.

There are some pretty clear tiers among the teams with at least a 1% chance to be involved in the end of season playoff conversation. Alabama, Ohio State, Penn State, Texas and Georgia should be either in the playoff at this point, or heavily involved in the conversation for one of the at large spots.

As you move down you have teams that are favorites to win their conference (Clemson, Boise State) but could face some serious trouble if they drop a game or two (Can lump Notre Dame in here as well).

The bottom 2 tiers should fill up some of the final slots for the 12 team playoff, or may even play underdog and steal a bid via winning their conference. Some teams (South Carolina, Florida for example) have QBs with star studded potential that could lead their team to a 10-2/9-3 season which could thrust them into the playoff conversation.

That concludes our two part season preview! LETS PUT TOE TO LEATHER BABY ITS HERE!

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