There's still half a college football season left to play, and among the many possible storylines is this entertaining one: Alabama and Notre Dame could miss the playoffs, while BYU and James Madison could make it.

College football is not a sport where anything can happen. We sometimes like to pretend it's stranger than it is, and for good reason: the players are 18 to 24 years old, and there's so much passion behind it that the acknowledgment of how predictable it all can be is dulling what we would prefer would be spicy. When these teams get together, throw away the recordswe like to say, because that is a rivalry. (The rivalry game that most often leads to this analysis is the annual one between Oklahoma and Texas. Last week, Texas won a 34-3 rout that went almost as a spreadsheet would have predicted.) More than any other In every major sport, we know what's going to happen in college football, right down to which five or seven of 134 teams have a real chance to win the national championship.

The 2024 season was unusually crazy. The race for the title is more varied than perhaps ever before and the second half is shaping up to be a cracker. Part of that dynamic is the natural consequence of a playoff system that just expanded from four to 12 teams, keeping more teams in contention longer. But the season has brought with it unique chaos, chaos that in some cases has never erupted before. So for the first time in a long time, I can tell you about the uncertainty of college football and not feel guilty about screwing it up in the name of excitement. The truism is now actually true: we don't know what will happen next.

The Week 6 games two weekends ago were among the most volatile in the history of the sport. Only a few times in the long history of college football has a weekend brought so much heart and soul to the top teams. The most one-sided football and cultural duel of any conference in decades was that between Alabama and Vanderbilt in the Southeastern Conference. The Crimson Tide hadn't lost to the conference's only “smart kid” school since 1984, a streak of 23 straight wins. But the Commodores stuck with the Tide shot for shot and delivered one more shot at the end, while one of Alabama's leading defensive players had a meltdown late in the game. No. 1 Bama was the 22.5-point favorite in the loss, while the Nos. 4, 9, 10 and 11 teams in the Associated Press poll also lost – all but one to an unranked opponent and even to the Rankings The opponent from this group was No. 25. A weekend like this doesn't happen once in a decade.

These surprises have not resulted in a national trend. Ranked teams are losing to unranked teams about as often this year as any other year. But upsets this season are different than surprises in any other season because no one has a roadmap for how the College Football Playoff selection committee will handle teams that eat dirt and recover. The cynical and probably true answer is that the committee will give SEC and Big Ten teams a lot of leniency while telling everyone else to expect less margin for error. But there are big questions.

For example, Notre Dame, as a 28-point favorite, lost to NIU of the Mid-American Conference in Week 2, one of the most surprising regular season results ever. Was this the end for her? A loss like that would normally be enough to keep the Irish out of the playoffs, but they worked their way back to No. 12 in the media poll this week. (Playoff committee rankings begin in early November.) One working assumption has been that SEC and Big Ten teams with two or possibly even three losses will earn playoff tickets, but does that hold true if one of the losses occurs? Vanderbilt? How much room do Alabama, Notre Dame and other blue bloods have left? Could Vanderbilt actually not be such a bad loss?

Here we have a fun, unheralded consequence of playoff expansion. For years, everyone expected that tripling the field would give elite teams a buffer after regular-season defeats wiped them out. That's inevitably still true, but the 12-man field has also brought with it a new kind of fear. Take Ole Miss, which has already suffered two brutal losses to Kentucky and LSU in games the Rebels should have won. In any other year, Ole Miss would be eliminated right now, and its fans could take their usual, peaceful place, getting drunk at tailgates at the Grove and not actually attending the team's games. But now there's a whole class of teams that can't be sure they'll be eliminated from contention for the national championship. The Ole Miss forums this week are a mix of fans upset about the failure of a promising season and others reasoning that finishing the season undefeated might still get them into the playoffs. The new system's refusal to allow fans of dying teams complete peace of mind is an underappreciated feature.

It's all great fun for people who just want to watch the world burn. Will the national title ultimately go to Georgia, Texas, Oregon or Ohio State? It certainly will. The anarchy in college football doesn't last forever. But the openness of the expanded playoffs, coupled with the early failures of some giants, has made for an unusually uncertain environment. Meanwhile, a list of programs with very real playoff aspirations currently includes the following schools, which would be extremely far away in any previous year with the same results:

• Indianawhich has played in all five bowl games in the last 30 years and is undefeated in its first year under a head coach hired by James Madison. Less than a year ago, IU committed to a $15.5 million buyout to get rid of its old coach.

• Iowa Statea strong contender for the title of worst football program in power conferences from the 1980s through 2016, when current coach Matt Campbell took over. The Cyclones are ahead in the Big 12, whose winner receives an automatic bid in the new format.

• Pittis doing pretty well at 6-0 a year after 3-9. This is a program that won national titles in 1937 and 1976 but was not a serious modern player. Until now.

• Boise State, Tulane, And James Madisonthe three leading candidates for the one automatic playoff bid, which goes to a conference champion outside of the power conferences. Whoever gets the spot will be 11th^Th or 12^Th But at least the entity that eliminates this team will be another college football team and not a committee of bureaucrats scoring hotel points at committee meetings.

In the long term, the expanded playoffs will help the Alabamas of the world recover from early-season missteps and stay on their path to a title. Nothing in college football is truly designed to support lower tier programs. But if you care about a historically mediocre school that's having a good year, you might think you can fly. It's mid-October and fans of a number of elite programs are sweating profusely while Indiana Hoosiers fans believe that no one in the world, not even God, could kill them. With six games and conference championships remaining, it's entirely possible that the few will get something nice while some of the sport's most storied programs miss out. Not much in this game is ever new, but this Is.