After 11 weeks of play, we finally get the first set of College Football Playoff rankings on Tuesday night.
When the first 12-team bracket is unveiled, it will include a number of teams who were expected to be firmly in the mix (hello, Ohio State, Georgia and Alabama) while other preseason favorites will be missing in action (goodbye, Penn State, Clemson and LSU).
Also in the CFP conversation will be a few teams that few projected to be there.
Here are three of those overachieving teams that should be in the first College Football Playoff bracket:
VIRGINIA
Losses by Georgia Tech and Miami on Saturday blew the race for the Atlantic Coast Conference championship wide open.
It’s no guarantee Virginia will be the highest-ranked ACC team in the initial CFP rankings, but the Cavaliers are the highest-ranked ACC team in the AP poll at No. 12. That’s two spots ahead of Louisville.
But considering Virginia is the lone unbeaten team in ACC play — the 35-31 Week 2 loss at North Carolina State counts as a nonconference clash — it should probably be the Cavaliers’ spot until (if) they lose a conference game.
Virginia is far and away the most surprising storyline in college football so far this season. The Cavaliers won 11 games in head coach Tony Elliott’s first three seasons. They haven’t made a bowl game since 2019, haven’t ranked among the AP’s top 12 since 2004 and haven’t started a season 8-1 since 1990.
And yet, here they sit at 8-1 (5-0 ACC).
There’s certainly been a bit of luck in Virginia’s last five games, which has included three overtime wins as well as needing a late safety to beat Washington State.
At what point does luck convert to a team simply being clutch? Virginia is very much testing that theory.
INDIANA
Maybe Indiana and coach Curt Cignetti should have been given a bit more benefit of the doubt entering Year 2.
After all, the Hoosiers came out of the parking lot beyond left field last season when they charged out to a 10-0 start after having zero 10-win seasons in the program’s forlorn past as the losingest team in college football history.
That Indiana team, while a remarkably impressive transformation by Cignetti, was not ready for prime time. In two games against big-boy programs (at Ohio State and at Notre Dame in the CFP), the Hoosiers lost both by a combined margin of 65-32.
That probably justified Indiana’s No. 20 preseason ranking to begin this season.
This fall, the second-ranked Hoosiers have shown 2024 was no fluke, jumping out to a 9-0 start after Saturday’s 55-10 win at Maryland. They’re No. 1 in scoring offense (46.4 points per game) and No. 3 in scoring defense (10.8), which leads to the nation’s best points differential (35.7 ppg).
Even more important, they’ve already done what they couldn’t a year ago — delivering a signature win when they went to then-No. 3 Oregon in Week 7 and became the first team to win there since 2022 with a 30-20 conquest.
With only Penn State, Wisconsin and Purdue left — a combined 0-16 in Big Ten play — not finishing the regular season undefeated would be a massive disappointment. A showdown with No. 1 Ohio State looms in the Big Ten championship game, but Indiana will be in the CFP regardless of that result if it’s 12-0.
BYU
For the second straight season, BYU will be firmly in the playoff mix when Tuesday’s initial rankings are released.
Last year’s team started 9-0 before fading with consecutive losses to fall out of the playoff picture. This year’s team was the first squad outside of the preseason AP Top 25 poll back in August.
Now the Cougars are in a remarkably similar place. When last year’s first CFP bracket dropped, BYU was 8-0, ranked ninth by the AP poll and alone atop the Big 12 standings. This time, the Cougars are 8-0, ranked eighth and alone atop the conference standings.
The Cougars are doing this with a true freshman quarterback in Bear Bachmeier (1,693 yards, 11 passing TDs, team-high nine rushing TDs), who arrived over the summer after initially enrolling at Stanford.
BYU ranks outside the top 25 in total offense and total defense, but it keeps finding ways to win.
The path home for the Cougars will be quite challenging. Two of their final four games are against the teams with one Big 12 loss: Texas Tech and Cincinnati.
But after exceeding expectations for the second straight year, can BYU navigate its way to its first playoff berth?
