Step 1: The College Football Playoff committee releases its first rankings of the season, and we overreact about what it means and who's getting propped up or held down. We start theorizing about how the rankings will shake down if or when most of the top teams win out.
Step 2: College football reminds us that very, very few teams actually win out.
Week 10 of the 2021 season gave us only one matchup of ranked teams and no slam-dunk headliner game. But Saturday became a survive-and-advance fireworks show all the same. No. 3 Michigan State, No. 9 Wake Forest, No. 12 Baylor and No. 13 Auburn all lost; No. 2 Alabama and No. 6 Cincinnati thought hard about doing the same; and No. 4 Oregon and No. 5 Ohio State looked frequently questionable while eventually winning by 10 and nine points respectively.
Only one team saw its playoff odds genuinely falter on Saturday: Michigan State, which went from a 16% chance of reaching the CFP, per the Allstate Playoff Predictor, to 2%. But Week 10 was a reminder that we're all walking on pretty shaky ground here.
Ten teams currently have playoff odds of at least 2%, per the Predictor: Georgia, Alabama, Oklahoma, Ohio State, Cincinnati, Michigan, Notre Dame, Oklahoma State, Oregon and Michigan State. Including conference championship games, however, only one currently has a greater than 50% chance of winning out, and even top-ranked Georgia is at only 53%.
There could be plenty of slip-ups on the way over the next four weeks. So in anticipation of future chaos, let's count down the games, players, matchups and potentially fatal flaws that will have the largest impact on the national title race moving forward.