The latest College Football Playoff rankings gave us plenty to argue about on our CFP rankings reaction show Nov. 10. Instead of wrapping things up with a neutral summary, we did the most responsible thing possible. We filled out a rapid-fire, gut-feeling bracket, March Madness style, and let a playoff predictor tool tell us how the rest of the college football season would shake out.

The rules were simple: no overthinking, no research, just gut picks and winners. Fast. In total we hand picked 70 games over the last three weeks of the regular season. Then we hit the big reveal button.

The result? A College Football Playoff field with Utah as the No. 1 seed, Houston, BYU, and Wake Forest all in, and more Big 12 teams than Big Ten teams.

How we built the CFP chaos bracket

The A to Z Sports College Football Playoff Predictor tool sorts the remaining games by playoff impact, which made our job a lot easier. We mostly went with favorites because, frankly, that’s reality.

We still had to have a little fun, though.

USC got the nod over Indiana this weekend for chaos purposes. Houston won out to finish 10-2, and Ole Miss figured it out to finish 9-3. Week 1 of our simulation was mostly chalk outside of a couple of sprinkles: Oklahoma State knocked off Texas Tech, and Florida shocked Kentucky.

The second week of our simulation was a down week overall (prepare yourself for a lackluster CFB Week 12), so we had to manufacture some drama.

The picks that broke everything

This is where things got juicy.

We took LSU over Tennessee in Week 12 just to see what it would do. I’m fully aware that might be the worst-case scenario for Vols fans. We also figured Georgia could afford a loss, so we handed South Carolina a win there. Missouri got a win over Kentucky because of Austin Simmons.

The final week was mostly chalk, but conference championship tiebreakers is where things continued to have some goofiness. Ohio State worked its way into the Big Ten title game as the favorite over UCLA, but enough to get the Buckeyes in the field, while keeping UCLA in a bye-slot. 

The ripple effects were massive. LSU got to four losses in this scenario, so the Tigers aren’t spoilers in the sense of sneaking into the field. They’re spoilers because they knocked out Tennessee. Missouri took care of Kentucky, and just like that, two more SEC teams were sitting on the outside.

The College Football Playoff field nobody saw coming

Then we flipped it over.

Houston is in. Wake Forest is in. BYU is in. Utah is the top seed. Georgia slid all the way to the No. 7 seed.

Count them up and you get Utah, Houston, and BYU representing the Big 12. Meanwhile, Indiana, Iowa, USC and Oregon are all on the outside, which leaves the Big Ten with just two teams: UCLA as a 12-1 conference championship game loser and a three-loss conference champion Ohio State.

More Big 12 teams than Big Ten teams. Just as we all predicted, right?

The model has Wake Forest seeded ahead of this version of Ohio State. Would anyone actually pick Wake over the Buckeyes right now? I don’t know… but the computer did.

There’s also a nostalgia angle here. A Big 12 Utah and a Big Ten UCLA sitting at the top of the bracket is a nice little shout out to the Pac-12 back in the day.

The craziest part of this whole exercise is how little we actually forced it. We mostly picked favorites outside of a few instances, and the bracket still turned into absolute CHAOS. That tells you how fragile this playoff picture really is with a few weeks to go.

Notre Dame fans won’t love it either. The Irish don’t make it to the semifinals in our version, which means an early vacation for our guy Ryan.

Part of me hopes it actually gets this crazy. Part of me knows a field without a big power program at the top would drive the national media up a wall. It makes for great TV either way.