And welcome back to the cover three podcast here on CBS Sports Network.

That's Tom Freneli, that's Bud Elliott.

I'm Chip Patterson, and we are so excited because we are just

tick, tick, tick, tick, counting down the days till the start of the college football season.

We got week zero action coming up on Saturday. Then start next Thursday, that five-day marathon

that is week one. And so it is time one last time here in the preseason to sort of get a

sense of the landscape. And what better way to do it than with some tears? All of us love to be able

to sort things into boxes, to sort things into tears. And the way that we have decided that we're

going to go about this is

really looking at expectations. You know, looking at the way that a fan base, the way that a team

should be going into the 2025 season to think about, you know, where they should end up at the end of

the year. So in our tiers that we have decided and debated on, even just trying to

put our tiers together, our tiers are tier number one, the very, very top, make the final four.

This means you have made it to the national semifinals of the 12 team college football

playoff. That means you've got a chip in a chair. You've got a real shot at the national

title. We will have more than four teams in that top tier because otherwise, why would you even do

the playoff? Okay, the next tier that we're going to have is going to be to make the quarterfinals

or the second round. The idea here is that if you are good enough to make the

playoff, maybe the expectation is you make the playoff and then win a game or by the

merit of a terrific regular season, you make it to the quarterfinals by getting one of those

top four seeds. Then the final tier, the one that I do think will be the most robust is the

make the playoff tier.

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