College football insider makes bold prediction about Michigan Wolverines’ suddenly realistic College Football Playoff chances
The Michigan Wolverines’ road to the College Football Playoffs is suddenly wide open this season
The Michigan Wolverines have had a rocky start to 2025 with a catastrophic loss to the Oklahoma Sooners but back-to-back solid Big Ten conference wins over Nebraska and Wisconsin. While they have quite the road ahead of them to go, that hasn’t stopped some analysts from buying into what the Wolverines are doing this season and what they are capable of come the end of the season.
It’s still far too early to make any (well, almost any) predictions about the College Football Playoffs, but it’s important to try and take a swing at predicting who the final teams can be every week to try and build a picture of who has made a case to be in so far this season. One of those predictions made a surprise choice this week, placing the Wolverines in his playoff predictions.
Bryan Fischer of Sports Illustrated tabbed the Wolverines as an 11-seed in his latest bowl predictions piece. Michigan would travel to take on the six-seed Alabama Crimson Tide, a rematch of last year’s Citrus Bowl that Michigan won.
Can Michigan Make the College Football Playoffs?
It might be a surprise to see the Wolverines ranked in the playoffs, but they might actually have a strong case to make it in by the end of the season, provided they take care of business in a couple of key games this season. Fischer broke down the case for the Wolverines to make it.
“It was an effective victory for Michigan over a pesky Wisconsin team at the Big House on Saturday afternoon and you can start to see a potential run brewing for Sherrone Moore’s team now. If Michigan can survive the trip to USC next week, it will likely be favored to win out the rest of the way until facing a certain Ohio State team at home for what figures to be a play-in for the Big Ten title game. If the Wolverines meet the Crimson Tide in a rematch of last year’s bowl game, you can bet the TV networks will make this the prime-time Saturday night game during the opening weekend of the playoff.”
Michigan has to travel to USC this week, but then they draw Washington, Michigan State, Purdue, Northwestern, and Maryland before their matchup against the Ohio State Buckeyes, all of which are winnable games. If Michigan beats USC and takes care of business against the teams they are favored against, then they could stand at the end of the season at 10-2 with their only losses to Oklahoma and Ohio State, both of whom were top-4 seeds in Fischer’s predictions. That would easily be enough to qualify for the playoffs, especially with the expanded format.
It all starts this weekend with a tough matchup on the road to USC, but the path to the playoffs is wide open for the Wolverines.
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