Washington Ranked 9th in College Football Playoff Rankings

The Washington Huskies ranked 9th in the most recent College Football Playoff Rankings released tonight. The top-4 (and playoff participants if the season ended today) were the same as last week: 1. Georgia, 2. Alabama, 3. Notre Dame, and 4. Clemson.

The Huskies moved up from 12th since last week. This wasn’t a surprise as 3 of the teams that were slotted in ahead of Washington lost last Saturday (#6 Ohio State, #7 Penn State, and #11 Oklahoma State).

Those results were a boon to Washington’s hopes of making the playoffs. When combined with UW’s win over Oregon and other results, the Huskies’ chances of making the playoffs increased from 26% to 32% according to Fivethirtyeight.com’s playoff predictor tool.

That same tool believes Washington would make the playoffs 84% of the time by winning the remainder of its games including a Pac-12 title bout; likely against USC. So the Huskies don’t quite control their own destiny but remain in a solid position should they continue to win. UW fans should be big fans of TCU and Iowa this weekend in matchups against Oklahoma and Wisconsin.

The Pac-12 has only 2 other teams in this week’s edition of the rankings (#11 USC and #19 Washington State). Both Arizona and Stanford dropped out after losing to the two teams noted above respectively. The Huskies will get the chance to beat both squads if they keep winning.

Here are the full Rankings with the number of ranked teams they have yet to play in the regular season, the % chance they win the rest of their regular season games, and the % chance they win their conference. Clemson is the only team ahead of the Huskies who has a better chance of winning the remainder of their games. Oklahoma, Clemson, and Alabama have better chances of winning their conference.