And The Winner Is... Using Analytics To Predict The CFP Champion

With the College Football Playoff set to begin in just over 32 hours, the excitement has reached a fever pitch among fans.

This feels like one of the most wide open fields in recent memory, with a handful of teams having legitimate cases as to why they could win it all in January.

READ: Clay Travis Makes His College Football Playoff Picks

While there's no such thing as a "sure thing" in college football, I figured there had to be a common thread linking all the past champions from the playoff era of this sport.

It turns out I'm in luck, as there were a couple of key predictive metrics that every champion from 2014 onward has held on their way to hoisting the CFP trophy.

The strongest predictor in a college football champion since the advent of the playoff is none other than SP+, a metric coined by college football writer Bill Connelly.

It's a rating system that is supposed to predict the outcome in a hypothetical (or real) game between two teams; a predictive metric, if you will.

Here is just an example of Connelly's madness in social media form.

While it's not an exact science (again, college football is wildly unpredictable), it has been incredibly successful in predicting winners and losers, and, in past years, every college football national champion has been in the top ten in both SP+'s offensive and defensive ratings.

It makes sense that a champion needs to be balanced on both sides of the ball, but there are only a few teams every year that can meet this criteria.

This year, only two teams can claim to have elite, top-ten ratings on both offense and defense, and the answer may shock some of you recruiting nerds (such as myself).

Outside the two Group of 5 teams in the playoff this year, the two worst rosters are the Indiana Hoosiers and the Texas Tech Red Raiders, and they just so happen to be the only two teams with offensive and defensive SP+ ratings in the top ten this season.

I was floored when I saw the numbers, but it's true.

Ohio State has the best overall SP+ rating and the best SP+ defensive rating, but their offense sits at 12th, just barely missing the cut.

Other teams, like Oregon and Georgia, were elite in defensive SP+ but lacking that final push on offense to put them in this elite category.

By virtue of a tiebreaker due to strength of schedule (or resume SP+, according to Connelly's metrics), Indiana just barely edges Texas Tech as the top dog in this experiment.

Does that mean Indiana is the slam dunk pick to win it all this year? History says so, but a Hoosiers national championship would be virtually unprecedented by every other metric available, most notably talent.

I mentioned being a recruiting nerd earlier, and the reason this run by Curt Cignetti and his team is so wild is for that exact reason: talent acquisition.

The Hoosiers sit at 72nd according to the team talent composite ratings on 247Sports.

For historical context, every champion has finished in the top ten in terms of talent besides the 2023 Michigan Wolverines, and they were 14th.

What I'm trying to say is this: Indiana is the number one overall seed in this year's College Football Playoff and has the historical metrics to win the whole thing, but I would still be relatively shocked to see them hang a banner in January.

I'll be rooting for my guy, Coach Cig, to buck the trend, but he has a tall task in front of him.

Regardless of who wins, I think we can all agree these next 32 hours will go by like months on a calendar.

The day is nearly here, let's have ourselves one hell of a College Football Playoff.