Culture
College Football Playoff at-large contenders: Cases for, against and fatal flaws
As the season approaches its final two weeks, jostling for at-large bids continues for teams in the upper echelon of College Football Playoff competition.
At this point, there are teams with CFP hopes both as a conference champion and as an at-large. There are others, such as Big 12 contenders BYU and Colorado, which need to win their conference to reach the Playoff. The same scenario exists for Group of 5 squads Boise State and Tulane.
For the teams strictly in at-large contention, what are the cases for their inclusion and what are the flaws that could keep them from the 12-team tournament? Below we examine 16 teams with at-large hopes — not just the 16 highest-ranked teams — and examine why they are worthy of at-large consideration while breaking down their flaws.
No. 1 Oregon (11-0)
By the numbers – Sagarin SOS (strength of schedule): 52; Record vs. FBS winning teams: 4-0; Record vs. FBS non-winning teams: 6-0; Points for: 33.9; Points against: 15.7.
Case for: The Ducks are the nation’s only unbeaten team, have ranked wins against Ohio State, Boise State and Illinois and compete in a coast-to-coast conference. At this stage, Oregon deserves the No. 1 ranking without debate.
Fatal flaw: This is more of a concern moving forward. Had Ohio State quarterback Will Howard slid a second earlier and called a timeout against Oregon, the Buckeyes might have kicked a game-winning field goal in Eugene. The teams are likely to meet in Indianapolis for the Big Ten championship. Should Oregon fall, the Ducks could face Boise State again in the CFP, and they won that game on a last-second field goal. Rematches against motivated opponents could pose challenges.
No. 2 Ohio State (10-1)
By the numbers – Sagarin SOS: 58; Record vs. FBS winning teams: 5-1; Record vs. FBS non-winning teams: 5-0; Points for: 37.8; Points against: 10.7.
Case for: The Buckeyes have the talent at every position to compete with any team in the country. They boast two NFL-caliber running backs and the nation’s top defense. Howard has completed 80 percent of his passes in six different games, and receivers Emeka Egbuka, Jeremiah Smith and Carnell Tate are an electrifying trio. On a neutral field, this team could win it all.
Fatal flaw: There are times the Buckeyes look ordinary, like in a 21-17 home win against Nebraska. Injuries to Ohio State’s top two offensive linemen could have consequences against a physical, athletic front. Howard has competed at a high level this year, but can he make the game-winning plays in a close contest against similar talent?
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No. 3 Texas (10-1)
By the numbers – Sagarin SOS: 39; Record vs. FBS winning teams: 7-1; Record vs. FBS non-winning teams: 3-0; Points for: 37.8; Points against: 12.1.
Case for: Texas can match up with anyone player-for-player. The Longhorns have the SEC’s top scoring defense and rank second nationally in total defense. They have an experienced quarterback in Quinn Ewers, elite players at every position and showed their grit by losing only one game so far in their first SEC season.
Fatal flaw: The Longhorns don’t own a victory over a current Top 25 team. They avoided Alabama, Ole Miss, Tennessee and South Carolina and they lost decisively to Georgia. That doesn’t take away their intent; the Longhorns traveled to defending national champion Michigan and won 31-19. But questions persist about how Texas will perform against fellow elite programs because they haven’t faced more than one entering this week’s showdown against Texas A&M.
By the numbers – Sagarin SOS: 37; Record vs. FBS winning teams: 6-1; Record vs. FBS non-winning teams: 4-0; Points for: 32.4; Points against: 14.6.
Case for: The Nittany Lions have handled their business in fine fashion. They survived at tough road venues like USC, Minnesota, Wisconsin and West Virginia with big plays in critical moments. Penn State has an underrated quarterback in Drew Allar, the nation’s best tight end in Tyler Warren and a top-five NFL Draft pick in edge rusher Abdul Carter. The Nittany Lions can adapt to different styles and weather won’t be a factor.
Fatal flaw: There are two big questions facing Penn State. One, can their wide receivers gain enough separation against an equally talented opponent? Two, can coach James Franklin string together multiple wins against top-10 competition? In Franklin’s 11 years, the Nittany Lions are 3-17 against top-10 opponents with only one victory in the last eight seasons.
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By the numbers – Sagarin SOS: 65; Record vs. FBS winning teams: 6-1; Record vs. FBS non-winning teams: 4-0; Points for: 39.0; Points against: 11.6.
Case for: Few, if any, teams have looked more impressive than Notre Dame in the last two months. Only once have the Irish allowed more than 16 points in a game, and they’ve scored at least 31 points in each of their last seven games. Quarterback Riley Leonard has become an elite playmaker and Notre Dame’s line of scrimmage play can hang with any opponent.
Fatal flaw: The Irish have ranked wins against Texas A&M and Army away from home, but their overall schedule was light. Notre Dame’s 16-14 loss to Northern Illinois has served as a lightning rod for criticism. For the Irish the scenario is simple: beat USC and pick up a home CFP game. Lose to the Trojans and probably fall from CFP consideration.
No. 6 Miami (10-1)
By the numbers – Sagarin SOS: 61; Record vs. FBS winning teams: 5-1; Record vs. FBS non-winning teams: 4-0; Points for: 44.7; Points against: 22.3.
Case for: The Hurricanes average more points than any team in CFP contention. With quarterback Cam Ward, Miami can fill it up. In five different games, the Hurricanes have scored at least 50 points.
Fatal flaw: No at-large contender allows more points per game than Miami at 22.3. The Hurricanes frequently have been involved in one-score games against unranked opponents and have needed late rallies to win. Miami has yet to play a Top 25 team, let alone beat one.
Miami will finish the regular season on the road against Syracuse on Saturday. (Sam Navarro / Imagn Images)
By the numbers – Sagarin SOS: 4; Record vs. FBS winning teams: 4-2; Record vs. FBS non-winning teams: 4-0; Points for: 33.2; Points against: 14.6.
Case for: Nobody has more quality wins than Georgia, which beat CFP contenders Clemson, Texas and Tennessee. When operating at a high level, the Bulldogs look like an eventual champion. They have a veteran quarterback and talent that jumps off the roster. Despite a loss at Alabama, their furious comeback attempt will scare any future opponent.
Fatal flaw: Which version of Carson Beck will take the field in the CFP? He’s thrown 12 interceptions and three picks in three different games, including in a loss to Alabama and a win against Texas. In a game between equally matched opponents, how Beck performs could enhance – or harm – Georgia’s performance.
No. 8 Tennessee (9-2)
By the numbers – Sagarin SOS: 57; Record vs. FBS winning teams: 3-2; Record vs. FBS non-winning teams: 5-0; Points for: 37.4; Points against: 13.1.
Case for: The Vols can play any style of football and compete. They rank second in the SEC in both points scored and points allowed. Running back Dylan Sampson is one of the nation’s three best running backs and sophomore quarterback Nico Iamaleava displays some dynamic qualities.
Fatal flaw: Outside of beating Alabama, the Vols have an ordinary resume. None of their nonconference opponents are bowl eligible, and they lost to 6-5 Arkansas at home. It’s why Tennessee hovered outside the CFP before Ole Miss and Alabama suffered losses last weekend.
No. 9 SMU (10-1)
By the numbers – Sagarin SOS: 59; Record vs. FBS winning teams: 5-1; Record vs. FBS non-winning teams: 4-0; Points for: 39.3; Points against: 21.0.
Case for: SMU’s ACC debut has been flawless with nary a loss despite a reduced revenue share. The Mustangs are one victory shy of running the table and advancing to the ACC title game. All-everything running back Brashard Smith was critical in wins against Duke and Pittsburgh.
Fatal flaw: An early loss to BYU lingers but not in the way most people expected back in September. With SEC teams slipping after their third loss, heightened scrutiny awaits SMU this weekend against Cal and in a potential ACC title game. It’s worth watching SMU’s defense, which has allowed at least 25 points to every bowl-eligible opponent since its BYU loss.
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By the numbers – Sagarin SOS: 68; Record vs. FBS winning teams: 3-1; Record vs. FBS non-winning teams: 6-0; Points for: 41.3; Points against: 16.0.
Case for: The eye test and statistics favor Indiana. The Hoosiers have an electrifying offense led by quarterback Kurtis Rourke and five receivers with at least 24 catches, 280 yards and three touchdowns. Indiana also plays high-level defense, which is unusual for a portal-based team.
Fatal flaw: As of today, Indiana has beaten three FBS teams with winning records but that could fall to zero by Saturday. Its strength of schedule is by far the lowest of any power conference team vying for an at-large bid. In the Hoosiers’ only game against a ranked opponent, they lost 38-15 to Ohio State.
No. 12 Clemson (9-2)
By the numbers – Sagarin SOS: 62; Record vs. FBS winning teams: 1-2; Record vs. FBS non-winning teams: 7-0; Points for: 37.6; Points against: 22.0.
Case for: In all but one of its victories, Clemson won by double figures. It has a potent offense guided by quarterback Cade Klubnik, who has 29 touchdowns and four interceptions. The Tigers are third in the ACC in both scoring offense and scoring defense.
Fatal flaw: Clemson has the most pedestrian resume of any potential at-large squad. It has played just three FBS teams with winning records and won just once, and that was last week against 7-4 Pittsburgh. The Tigers give up nearly 23 points a game, the second-most of any team in the CFP Top 25.
No. 13 Alabama (8-3)
By the numbers – Sagarin SOS: 7; Record vs. FBS winning teams: 6-3; Record vs. FBS non-winning teams: 1-0; Points for: 36.2; Points against: 17.5.
Case for: In the first half against Georgia or throughout its victories against LSU and Missouri, Alabama looked like not only a CFP team but a title contender. Nine of its 11 FBS opponents have winning records, including seven of eight SEC opponents.
Fatal flaw: It really starts and ends with the win-loss record. Losing three games would end CFP hopes for nearly every other program save for Alabama. The Tide dropped games to Vanderbilt and Oklahoma, both of which are 6-5. It’s not impossible to build a case for Alabama’s inclusion, but it involves losses by multiple teams this weekend rather than for the Tide to simply beat Auburn.
No. 14 Ole Miss (8-3)
By the numbers – Sagarin SOS: 31; Record vs. FBS winning teams: 5-2; Record vs. FBS non-winning teams: 2-1; Points for: 38.5; Points against: 13.9.
Case for: Just watch the Rebels in action. It’s a potent offense led by Jaxson Dart and Tre Harris, capable of putting up points on everyone. Ole Miss crushed Georgia 28-10 and scored 63 points on Arkansas, which held Tennessee to 14. The defense has NFL-caliber performers, especially along the line.
Fatal flaw: Not only do Mississippi’s three losses make it difficult to climb into the CFP, but it’s also who beat the Rebels. None of the three teams are ranked by the committee with LSU (7-4) posting the best record. Losing at home to Kentucky (4-7) is probably the kill shot.
Ole Miss’ loss to Florida last week dropped the Rebels’ Playoff chances to 9 percent, per The Athletic’s model. (Matt Pendleton / Imagn Images)
No. 15 South Carolina (8-3)
By the numbers – Sagarin SOS: 18; Record vs. FBS winning teams: 4-3; Record vs. non-winning FBS teams: 3-0; Points for: 32.9; Points against: 18.2.
Case for: Of the 8-3 teams hovering in the SEC’s second tier, the Gamecocks won the important head-to-head battles against Texas A&M and Missouri. South Carolina has one of college football’s most dominant defensive lines with 39 sacks. Its offensive efficiency is impressive.
Fatal flaw: This is the season of “almosts” for South Carolina. Two touchdowns were called back against LSU because of penalties and a failed two-point conversion cost the Gamecocks an overtime opportunity against Alabama. Barring a chaotic scenario rivaling 2007, South Carolina “almost” will get into the CFP.
By the numbers – Sagarin SOS: 33; Record vs. winning teams: 3-1; Record vs. non-winning teams: 6-1; Points for: 30.5; Points against: 22.8.
Case for: Arizona State has posted its two most impressive wins in the last two weeks, beating Kansas State 24-14 on the road before toppling BYU 28-23 at home. The Sun Devils, who are led by versatile running back Cam Skattebo, have churned out five wins by a touchdown or less.
Fatal flaw: The Sun Devils have a 7.7-point differential, which is by far the lowest of any potential at-large team. Their losses came against 7-4 Texas Tech and 5-6 Cincinnati, and they’ve played only four teams with winning records.
By the numbers – Sagarin SOS: 40; Record vs. winning teams: 4-1; Record vs. non-winning teams: 4-1; Points for: 31.4; Points against: 19.5.
Case for: The Cyclones are resilient, as demonstrated by three come-from-behind victories in the closing seconds. Iowa State has the Big 12’s best pass defense, which ranks third overall. Their receiving combination of Jayden Higgins and Jaylin Noel has compiled nearly 2,000 yards and 13 touchdowns.
Fatal flaw: Iowa State steadily climbed the rankings until losing two straight to Texas Tech and Kansas (5-6). The Cyclones don’t own any Top 25 wins, and their depleted defense has given up more than 230 rushing yards in three of their last five games.
(Top photo: Johnnie Izquierdo / Getty Images))
A famous poet once observed that it is difficult to get the news from poems. The weather is a different story. April showers, summer sunshine and — maybe especially — the chill of winter provide an endless supply of moods and metaphors. Poets like to practice a double meteorology, looking out at the water and up at the sky for evidence of interior conditions of feeling.
The inner and outer forecasts don’t always match up. This short poem by Louise Glück starts out cold and stays that way for most of its 11 lines.
And then it bursts into flame.
“Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” comes from Glück’s debut collection, “Firstborn,” which was published in 1968. She wrote the poems in it between the ages of 18 and 23, but they bear many of the hallmarks of her mature style, including an approach to personal matters — sex, love, illness, family life — that is at once uncompromising and elusive. She doesn’t flinch. She also doesn’t explain.
Here, for example, Glück assembles fragments of experience that imply — but also obscure — a larger narrative. It’s almost as if a short story, or even a novel, had been smashed like a glass Christmas ornament, leaving the reader to infer the sphere from the shards.
We know there was a couple with a flat tire, and that a year later at least one of them still has feelings for the other. It’s hard not to wonder if they’re still together, or where they were going with those Christmas presents.
To some extent, those questions can be addressed with the help of biographical clues. The version of “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” that appeared in The Atlantic in 1967 was dedicated to Charles Hertz, a Columbia University graduate student who was Glück’s first husband. They divorced a few years later. Glück, who died in 2023, was never shy about putting her life into her work.
But the poem we are reading now is not just the record of a passion that has long since cooled. More than 50 years after “Firstborn,” on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, Glück celebrated the “intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine” relations between poets and their readers. Recalling her childhood discovery of William Blake and Emily Dickinson, she declared her lifelong ardor for “poems to which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator.”
That’s the kind of poem she wrote.
“Confidence” can have two meanings, both of which apply to “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson.” Reading it, you are privy to a secret, something meant for your ears only. You are also in the presence of an assertive, self-possessed voice.
Where there is power, there’s also risk. To give voice to desire — to whisper or cry “I want you” — is to issue a challenge and admit vulnerability. It’s a declaration of conquest and a promise of surrender.
What happens next? That’s up to you.
Cold weather can serve as a plot point or emphasize the mood of a scene, and this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the locations of recent novels that work winter conditions right into the story. Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, the questions offer an additional hint about the setting. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
When a writer is praised for having a sense of place, it usually means one specific place — a postage stamp of familiar ground rendered in loving, knowing detail. But Kiran Desai, in her latest novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” has a sense of places.
This 670-page book, about the star-crossed lovers of the title and several dozen of their friends, relatives, exes and servants (there’s a chart in the front to help you keep track), does anything but stay put. If “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” were an old-fashioned steamer trunk, it would be papered with shipping labels: from Allahabad (now known as Prayagraj), Goa and Delhi; from Queens, Kansas and Vermont; from Mexico City and, perhaps most delightfully, from Venice.
There, in Marco Polo’s hometown, the titular travelers alight for two chapters, enduring one of several crises in their passionate, complicated, on-again, off-again relationship. One of Venice’s nicknames is La Serenissima — “the most serene” — but in Desai’s hands it’s the opposite: a gloriously hectic backdrop for Sonia and Sunny’s romantic confusion.
Their first impressions fill a nearly page-long paragraph. Here’s how it begins.
Sonia is a (struggling) fiction writer. Sunny is a (struggling) journalist. It’s notable that, of the two of them, it is she who is better able to perceive the immediate reality of things, while he tends to read facts through screens of theory and ideology, finding sociological meaning in everyday occurrences. He isn’t exactly wrong, and Desai is hardly oblivious to the larger narratives that shape the fates of Sunny, Sonia and their families — including the economic and political changes affecting young Indians of their generation.
But “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is about more than that. It’s a defense of the very idea of more, and thus a rebuke to the austerity that defines so much recent literary fiction. Many of Desai’s peers favor careful, restricted third-person narration, or else a measured, low-affect “I.” The bookstores are full of skinny novels about the emotional and psychological thinness of contemporary life. This book is an antidote: thick, sloppy, fleshy, all over the place.
It also takes exception to the postmodern dogma that we only know reality through representations of it, through pre-existing concepts of the kind to which intellectuals like Sunny are attached. The point of fiction is to assert that the world is true, and to remind us that it is vast, strange and astonishing.
See the full list of the 10 Best Books of 2025 here.
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