CFB analyst Joel Klatt dropped his final college football playoff bracket prediction in video form, and depending on your personal thoughts, it could be pretty surprising.
Klatt's predicted playoff rankings are as follows:
1. Penn State
2. Texas
3. Clemson
4. Ohio State
5. Georgia
6. Oregon
7. Notre Dame
8. Kansas State
9. Alabama
10. LSU
11. Michigan
12. Boise State
He has Texas finishing as the No.2 seed, so they get a round 1 bye to start things off. In the meantime, Klatt has LSU playing Notre Dame to see who gets to play the Longhorns in the quarterfinals. He then has Texas defeating Notre Dame to get to the semifinal game against Clemson.
Klatt described how the semifinal game could go:
"This Clemson-Texas Game, I think could be an all time great game. Where we continue to, I think we continue to lean into this idea of parity in the sport, where we're going to get teams that are very close and matched up, Manning against Klubnik. I'm going to go with the more experienced quarterback here. I think Dabo and Klubnik and that defense and just their overall soundness get the job done. And I think we're going to have an Ohio State-Clemson national championship."
I wouldn't necessarily call it "surprising", but it's weird that so many members of the national media are so low on Texas' chances in the college football playoffs. Yes, they have an inexperienced quarterback, but they're absolutely stacked in almost every other position along with having one of the most tenured coaching staffs in the game.
It just seems odd that for the preseason rankings that came out not too long ago, the Longhorns were praised for being so overwhelmingly talented and deep. Now all of a sudden nobody thinks that this aspect would help them in the postseason. One could argue that it would mean that they'd have an even better shot in the playoffs than some of the other top teams with lesser team depth.
Nobody is really forecasting Texas to win the national championship anymore, with most the national media widely having them lose in the quarterfinals or semifinals.