CFP Bracketology: How does Colorado make the College Football Playoff?

The Colorado Buffaloes are more than just your loud friend in the group chat when it comes to the college football landscape. Following a tumultuous first season in Boulder for head coach Deion Sanders wherein the Buffs won just one conference game in the now-defunct Big 12, Colorado has already achieved bowl eligibility with four more games left on the schedule.

But they could be thinking bigger now — specifically, the Buffaloes and Coach Prime could have eyes for the College Football Playoff.

On Tuesday night, the first College Football Playoff rankings were released ahead of Week 11 and Colorado came in ranked No. 20. Obviously, that's not nearly good enough to get the 6-2 Buffaloes into the 12-team College Football Playoff. At the same time, though, what we saw in the initial rankings and with the five highest-ranked conference champions getting automatic berths, the path for Colorado to find its way into the CFP has never been clearer.

What does that path look like? Let's lay it on the table.

College Football Playoff Bracketology: Colorado's path to make the CFP

Based on the initial CFP rankings, the only path for Colorado to make the College Football Playoff is by being crowned Big 12 champions and earning that automatic bid into the 12-team field. The good news for Shedeur Sanders, Travis Hunter, Coach Prime and the like is that's actually a far more realistic possiblity.

The surest way for Colorado to, for starters, get to the Big 12 Championship Game is to win out. While they have two losses on the year, only one to this point has come in conference play (the other was at Nebraska), giving them an identical record to the Iowa State Cyclones and putting them behind undefeated BYU.

So, while the Buffaloes need wins at Texas Tech, vs. Utah, at Kansas, and vs. Oklahoma State to finish the year — all games they are projected as favorites in — they also do need a bit of help. They got some of that with Iowa State losing to the Red Raiders in Week 10 and, more crucially, with the Kansas State team who has a head-to-head win over Colorado losing its second game in Big 12 play to lowly Houston.

Holding serve over the final four games of the season will require some help still for the Buffs to get into the Big 12 title bout, though. Specifically, another loss from Iowa State would put Colorado squarely in the driver's seat. The great news for Coach Prime's program is that the Cyclones have arguably the toughest remaining schedule of any Big 12 contender, on the road at Kansas, hosting Cincinnati, on the road at Utah, and hosting rival Kansas State to end the season. Given the close games Matt Campbell's team has played, those are all losable games.

So let's paint out the simplest and perhaps most likely scenario in which Colorado gets to the Big 12 Championship Game as plainly as possible: The Buffaloes win their remaining four games, Iowa State loses in Farmageddon to K-State, and Colorado earns its date with BYU. Hand the Cougars their first loss of the season for a conference title, and Coach Prime is making good on his promise of getting into the Playoff.

It's simple, right? Of course, the first step is winning the next one before focusing on winning the next three-to-four. But it's still quite realistic that Colorado can find its way into the College Football Playoff, even if getting an at-large berth is a pipe dream with their initial ranking of 20th.