Clemson left out of ESPN early 2025 Playoff prediction

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ESPN's Bill Connelly did an early prediction on the 2025 College Football Playoff ($), and he sees Louisville topping the Tigers for that road trip before an ACC title and keeping a preseason Top 10 Clemson team out completely:

ACC champion

The rule: It has to be won by either Clemson (2011, 2015 to 2020, 2022, 2024) or a team that beat Clemson in the regular season (2012 to 2014, 2021, 2023).

Indeed, the ACC has been pretty straightforward for the past 14 seasons. Virginia Tech's wild 44-33 win over Florida State in the 2010 ACC championship -- MVP: Tyrod Taylor; head coaches: Frank Beamer and Jimbo Fisher (translation: It was a while ago) -- is the last time either Dabo Swinney's Clemson or a team that beat Clemson didn't win this league. And even since Clemson's downfall as a national title contender after the 2020 season, the trend has held. Either someone knocks Clemson out of contention in the regular season and then capitalizes, or Clemson makes it to, and wins, in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Clemson enters 2025 ranked seventh on Schlabach's list, and the Tigers play the following ACC opponents: SMU (No. 15), Duke ("also considered"), Florida State and Syracuse at home, and Louisville (No. 20), Georgia Tech ("also considered"), Boston College and North Carolina on the road. It would be very poetic if Kevin Jennings and SMU got revenge for last year's ACC championship loss and Jennings got another playoff chance after his devastating mistakes in the 2024 CFP. We'll pare this list down even further and say that the most likely ACC team to beat Clemson in 2025 will be Louisville because the talented Cardinals host the Tigers.

The winner: Louisville. It would make more sense to choose Clemson, but I already chose chalk when given a similar choice with Georgia. So we'll say Louisville's regular-season win over Clemson keeps the Tigers out of Charlotte, and the Cardinals lock up their first league title since taking a share of the 2012 Big East crown.

Connelly also has UNC slipping into the field as an at-large team.

"I laughed when I realized my choice. With an awesome defense and Mateer leading a transformed offense, Oklahoma is the most obvious pick, but that's the problem: It's too obvious," Connelly said. "The Sooners can never write an Indiana-like underdog story, even though its fans carry the biggest chip in college football on their shoulders. It was tempting to sneak Daniels and Kansas in here, especially because I already had them in the Big 12 championship, and I really like Aguilar at UCLA. But what was I supposed to do, not pick a Bill Belichick team? The only thing more incredible than watching Belichick get subjected to a mayo bath after winning the Duke's Mayo Bowl would be watching Belichick guide North Carolina to an out-of-nowhere CFP bid."

In the prediction exercise, Georgia, Penn State and Utah join Louisville as Top 4 auto bids as conference champs, with UNC making a tradition of first-round ACC trips to Texas, as an 11-seed, and losing there also. Louisville is picked to lose to Alabama in the Orange Bowl and Penn State is projected to win the national title.

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