Our College Football Playoff predictions, and a sleeper team to leave you outraged

Who will make the college football playoff in the 2026 season? Well, you could wait until December and find out, or you could let us tell you today on this edition of SEC Football Unfiltered, our podcast from the USA Today Network.

I'm Blake Topmeyer alongside John Adams, and we are ready to make our college football playoff picks, but I'm not sure John and I are smart enough to get them all right on our own, so much like we did Last year, we're going to put our heads together, each be responsible for picking six teams.

We're stuck with whatever our co-host picks.

Cannot make any changes to their picks.

John can't make any changes to mine.

And through this collaborative effort, we will determine the 12 teams that will make the college football playoff.

John, you pretty confident we can go 12 for 12? I think we could come very close to that.

Wow.

Don't ask me to define close.

Nine out of 12?

Yeah.

Maybe.

I know we didn't go 100% last year, but I know we got some right.

A better host would have gone back and looked how many we got right.

But, well, you're stuck with what you got here.

So we did okay, I think, last year

when we did

this effort.

I like to think of it that we did really well is how I remember it.

So I've moved on now.

All right.

Don't look back, Blake.

No more looking back.

We'll start, John.

You got the first pick.

We're just going to go back and forth here.

Again, no objections.

I can't stop you from picking who you want.

You can't stop me.

The only rules we must follow are to review for our listeners, because I know this has been difficult to keep up with, with all the discussion of how the playoffs going to change.

Is it going to expand? How do we determine the teams? Just review.

It's still a 12 team playoff after all that.

This year, there's going to be five automatic bids, which will include at least one team from the group of six.

It's the group of six now, John, no longer the group of five because the Pac-12 is back in the picture.

There's not 12 teams anymore, but it's back as a conference.

So there's got to be a group of six team plus the power fours, and then we can have our at-larges as well.

So we'll stick to the rules, but otherwise you can pick who you want.

So with the first pick, In our 2026 college football playoff projections, you will give us...