Opinions vary on ESPN's SP+ algorithm, designed and maintained by Bill Connelly. Alabama football fans will love Connelly's predictive calculation on college football's 12 Playoff teams. His model has the Alabama Crimson Tide as the No. 2 seed, as a result of winning the SEC Championship.
Preseason prediction models are far from definitive. All of them improve as the season plays out. It takes at least the first half of any season for enough game data to start giving predictive models accuracy.
Alabama football fans will gladly ignore the preceding paragraph and ride a wave of Alabama Crimson Tide optimism.
According to the SP+, five SEC teams will make the next Playoff field. The other four are Georgia, seeded No. 6, Texas, seeded No. 9, Tennessee, seeded No. 10, and Ole Miss, seeded No. 11. It is presumed that the exit of Nico Iamaleava from Tennessee is yet to be calculated in the Vols' ranking.
Any college football fan choosing to hate Connelly's prediction will have some company in Baton Rouge. LSU head coach Brian Kelly will likely hate the model's result more than anyone.
The top four predicted seeds with first-round byes are Ohio State, Alabama, Clemson, and Kansas State. The No. 12 seed is predicted to be Boise State, as the highest-ranked Group of Five champion. The SP+ rankings have Boise State at No. 31 among all FBS teams.
The final field will, of course, never match the current SP+ prediction. If it did, SEC first-round games would pit Georgia hosting Ole Miss; Tennessee taking on Notre Dame in South Bend, and Texas going west to battle Oregon.
Perspective for Alabama Football Fans
How much faith should Alabama football fans put into the early SP+ prediction? Writing for Saturday Blitz, Andrew Boardwine provides interesting insight. "The SP+ model is just a projection, of course. It doesn’t account for a lot of things, but it does reveal how ESPN’s analytics view the hierarchy of the sport heading into 2025—and it’s hard to ignore how SEC-heavy the outcome is."