College Football Playoff 2018: Who is still alive after Week 1?

If you lose in Week 1, you’re pretty much eliminated from the College Football Playoff. No team has yet made the four-team field after losing in Week 1.

It is never too early in a college football season to begin thinking about where teams might land in the postseason. The College Football Playoff era has redoubled the significance of ever regular-season contest, especially the early battles between non-conference opponents. Those matchups can often have an outsized impact on the playoff race.

With this week’s reintroduction of the weekly Sunday Morning Quarterback series, we take the opportunity this week to look at the 16 teams that have made the College Football Playoff in the four years of the current postseason system. In studying these teams, we will distill down the critical points that define the group of playoff participants and use those markers to try to identify teams that are still alive in the race this season.

In some ways, it feels silly to eliminate solid football teams only a few days into the month of September. But as we have identified, it is possible to be eliminated even before the season begins. (Just ask any Group of Five team about that fact.)

In any given year, only 15 to 20 teams have a real shot at reaching the College Football Playoff. Keep reading this week’s edition of Sunday Morning Quarterback as we break down what we can learn from these season openers and sift through to find their common threads before applying that knowledge to the current crop of contenders.