We’ve got a bunch of bowl games between now and New Year’s Eve to keep us happy and satiated, but the College Football Playoff quarterfinals are the games that we are all waiting for and excited about. With the first-round results locked in, now we know the final eight and the games that will give us our final four, a very important term in college sports, as we all know.
Ohio State vs. Miami on NYE is the first of the four quarterfinal matchups, followed by Oregon vs. Texas Tech, Alabama vs. Indiana, and Mississippi vs. Georgia once we flip the calendar to 2026. The lines are out and we haven’t seen a significant amount of betting impact or line adjustments to most of these games, but we have seen some and those are worth mentioning here in what is a little bit of a delayed Opening Line Report.
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College Football Playoff Odds Report
Lines as of Sunday, December 21 at 9:00 p.m. PT
Cotton Bowl: Miami vs. Ohio State (-9.5, 42.5)
Wednesday, Dec. 31, 7:30 p.m. ET
The Cotton Bowl in Arlington, TX could have featured a Texas team, but Miami outlasted Texas A&M to earn a date with Ohio State. This is a line that has been fairly polarizing around the betting world, as some had it too low, others had it too high, and some were just right. We’ve seen this line as high as 10 or 10.5 at some shops before settling back in just below double digits in what projects to be a real defensive struggle.
It’s hard to expect anything but a rock fight, given that we saw that between the Hurricanes and Aggies in College Station and the Buckeyes have had arguably the best defense in the nation all season long. This is a line that some books opened around a touchdown or so and quickly got told that it was the wrong number. Most shops opened it 9.5 or close to double digits, which is where we will probably sit for a while, given that Miami, despite some defensive injuries and a bit of attrition against Texas A&M, still has a defense that grades a lot better than the offense.
Orange Bowl: Oregon (-1.5, 52.5) vs. Texas Tech
Thursday, Jan. 1, Noon ET
Of the four playoff games, this line is the one that interests me the most. You have an Oregon team that completely and totally blew the cover against James Madison against a Texas Tech team that emerged from a Big 12 Conference that was disrespected for a large chunk of the season. It is fair to wonder how conference perception will play into this market, as Indiana, Ohio State, and Oregon account for 37.5% of the teams left standing, while the Big 12 was pretty much locked in as a one-bid league throughout.
That said, the Red Raiders shine from a metrics standpoint, as their defense was among the nation’s elite and the offense, at least when Behren Morton was healthy, showed a ton of promise. Both of these teams are a long way from home here and it is entirely reasonable to wonder who, if anybody, ends up with a crowd edge down in Orlando. Suffice it to say that this line has the widest range of outcomes among the quarterfinal games, as it could go up, it could go down, we could see a flipped favorite, or we could see bettors just simply not know what to do with this game at all.
Rose Bowl: Alabama vs. Indiana (-6.5, 48.5)
Thursday, Jan. 1, 4 p.m. ET
What I find most interesting about this line is that there are going to be a lot of people out there, especially from the older crowd of college football fans, that just can’t wrap their heads around Indiana being in this spot. Truth be told, if we were talking about two teams that were regularly in the national landscape, this line would probably be higher. But, the Hoosiers aren’t in this spot and the Crimson Tide seem to always find themselves in marquee games. Perception bias is probably having an impact on this one.
And it will be interesting to see if that remains the case or not. Again, Alabama playing in a huge December or January game is simply commonplace. Usually Indiana’s biggest games during that part of the year are on the college basketball side of things. The prevailing thought after Alabama’s win against Oklahoma was that neither team was particularly impressive, but we have seen Alabama play a playoff game and we haven’t seen Indiana since the Big Ten Championship Game that some may feel they were lucky to win with Ryan Day’s abhorrent game management. These things do impact lines, but when you really dig into the metrics, the books sitting 7 probably have it closer to right than any line at 6.5.
Sugar Bowl: Mississippi vs. Georgia (-6.5, 55.5)
Thursday, Jan. 1, 8 p.m. ET
When expectations are heaped on a team, the court of public opinion is rarely impressed. Mississippi crushed Tulane and it didn’t really seem to register because the Rebels had already done that in the regular season and we all expected them to come out for interim-turned-full-time-head coach Pete Golding. They did, but somehow it feels as though they’ve been either punished for it or simply not given enough credit for what they did in that CFP spotlight.
Or, maybe that read is entirely wrong and we’re just looking at a situation where a Georgia team that outright dominated the SEC Championship Game against Alabama is just a sleeping giant. We did not get a Bulldogs vs. Rebels regular season game, but there is some sentiment within the betting world that if we had, it would have been an Ole Miss loss and possibly a game that kept the team out of the CFP. The early indications are that we are more likely to see -7 than we are to see the line go down. It’s hard to argue with that, even if Mississippi did what they were supposed to do in the first round.
Mississippi vs. Georgia Matchup
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