Every year Pate runs fan-submitted bold predictions through his own boldness scale, and every year almost nothing clears a nine. This year, one prediction did more than clear it. It maxed it out.
Grant from Ann Arbor sent in a scenario where Ohio State and Oregon play three times in a season, Ohio State wins all three, and Ohio State wins the national championship on top of it. Pate didn't hesitate.
The scale itself carries stakes for the audience, not just the segment. Pate hands out a chalice of supremacy to anyone who grades a nine and a half or higher and then watches it actually happen. Three people earned one last year. A 10 is the ceiling — the show has barely used it before this.
The case for a perfect 10
Pate's breakdown wasn't about talent or matchups. It was about sequencing, and sequencing is where this prediction falls apart before it ever gets to football. No two teams have ever played each other three times in a single season in this sport. That alone makes it a first. Then Ohio State has to beat Oregon in the regular season. Then Oregon has to avoid every other loss on the schedule just to get to Indianapolis. Then Ohio State has to win the Big Ten title game rematch. Then Oregon still has to make the playoff. Then the bracket has to fall in a way that puts the two teams on a collision course a third time. Then Ohio State has to win that game too — and still finish the job with a national title.
“So four things have to go right. Only a fraction of that is within Ohio State's control. So for those reasons, I'm making that a 10.”
“So four things have to go right. Only a fraction of that is within Ohio State's control. So for those reasons, I'm making that a 10.”— Josh Pate
That's the Film Room version of the pick: isolate the one variable neither team controls — bracket construction — and the whole prediction lives or dies on machinery nobody in Columbus or Eugene gets to touch. Ohio State can win every game handed to it and still never see Oregon a third time if the seeding breaks wrong.
Give Grant credit before the takedown. The first two legs of this — Ohio State beating Oregon once, then again in a title game — are built on a real, current, quality rivalry. This isn't a prediction about two irrelevant programs colliding by accident. It's a prediction about two of the sport's best teams, stretched past the point any schedule or bracket has ever actually produced.
The honest complication
Here's where the grading gets interesting. Later in the same batch, Pate graded a fan pick that Cal and Virginia Tech both finish top three in the ACC, with one of them winning the league outright, at a 9.75. “You're requiring that five of the top six in the preseason odds don't finish in the top three to make room for presumably Miami and then Virginia Tech and Cal.” That's asking the entire preseason odds board to be wrong about five different programs at once — arguably a demand every bit as chaotic as a three-peat matchup nobody has ever seen. “That's a 9.75 for me.”
If a full-league odds inversion only rates a 9.75, the gap between that and a perfect 10 is thin enough to argue about. The honest read: Pate's scale isn't broken, but the top of it is getting crowded, and reasonable people could swap the two grades and lose no credibility doing it.
Still, there's a difference between historically improbable and never-before-seen, and Pate built his 10 on the second category. The ACC pick asks for chaos. The Ohio State-Oregon pick asks for something that has literally never occurred in the sport, four separate times, in sequence, with the final result depending on a bracket nobody controls yet.
A nine and a half gets you close. A 10 gets you a chalice — if it hits. Watch the full segment for how Pate scored the Ohio-in-the-MAC sleeper pick and the Texas-Georgia playoff scenario, then decide for yourself whether Grant's prediction deserved the ceiling or whether the scale needs more room at the top.
Articles are drafted from Josh Pate's College Football Show under the site's editorial standards and monitored by the editorial team — corrections are timestamped, never silent.
CONTINUED FROM THE NOTEBOOK
Pate's Line In The Sand: 12 Is The Number, And 24 Is A Race To The Bottom
Ahead of Monday's CFP Management Committee meeting, Pate laid out why a jump to 24 teams isn't just too big — it's a betrayal of the thing that makes regular season Saturdays matter.
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The Pate State StaffAUG 10, 2026
Pate's claim is not that 24 teams would be bad television. His claim is that 24 teams would quietly kill the exact thing that makes the sport worth watching in September and October: the pucker factor.
That's the argument he built the whole segment around, and he built it on purpose, before the College Football Playoff Management Committee meets Monday to discuss expansion beyond the current 12-team format.
Context matters here. Pate reported rumblings of a possible 20-team model with conference play-in games, but the public fight, as he laid it out, is between the SEC's preferred 16 and a Big Ten-backed push toward 24. Greg Sankey's stance, per Pate, has been to gather information rather than draw a hard line. Monday's meeting is where that information starts arriving.
The case: 12 is the ceiling, not a waypoint
Pate conceded something first, which is worth noting before the argument gets sharp. He admitted he pushed back on expansion to 12 originally and has come around on it, given Portal and NIL reshaping the sport's parity. That concession is what makes his next line land. “It's impossible for me to come around on 24 because you've reached the saturation point.”
The mechanism he's describing is simple enough to verify on any given Saturday. Watch Texas play Texas A&M late in a season under a 12-team model: the winner is likely in, the loser is likely out. That's the trigger. The consequence is a stomach-level urgency you can feel through a television. Now run that same game through a 24-team frame. Both teams have a playoff safety net. The consequence changes: nothing but seeding is on the table. Pate's phrase for it — the loser's not sure and the winner's not sure, and that not-sure feeling is inventory the sport pays out one bank at a time.
His sharpest version of the trade came wrapped in specific programs. “Minnesota and Nebraska are never going to whiff a national championship. Texas may, Georgia may. And so we we're removing meaning from the games featuring the teams capable of winning it all to manufacture meaning on games featuring teams incapable of winning at all.”
“Minnesota and Nebraska are never going to whiff a national championship. Texas may, Georgia may. And so we we're removing meaning from the games featuring the teams capable of winning it all to manufacture meaning on games featuring teams incapable of winning at all.”— Josh Pate
That's not a knock on Minnesota or Nebraska. It's Pate crediting both sides of the ledger before he swings the sword: expansion adds stakes to games between flawed teams and removes stakes from games between the sport's best rosters. You don't get the first without paying for it with the second. That's the exchange rate nobody wants to say out loud.
He applied the same logic to the exclusion argument that expansion proponents lean on hardest — the idea that any format capable of leaving out a potential title team is too small. Pate's answer, stated plainly on the show, is that a field that leaves a flawed-but-talented team on the outside looking in is the correct size, not a broken one. He pointed to Notre Dame and Texas getting left out last year as proof the current cut line is doing its job, not failing at it.
The complication buried in the sound bites
Here's the honest counter: Pate's strongest evidence against 24 isn't a stat. It's Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti's own words, and Pate spent a large chunk of the segment playing them back.
Petitti's comparison to MLB's playoff structure drew the sharpest response of the show. “I don't think you do understand the difference because if you understand the difference, then you understand that is a playoff sport and they play 162 regular season games that are largely irrelevant.” The complication is real, though: coaches and administrators — the people whose job security is actually on the line — are largely aligned behind 24. Pate doesn't dispute that alignment exists. He disputes that it should carry the weight it's currently carrying. “One of the more shocking headlines of the modern era is that coaches and ads whose very job security relies on making the playoff are all of a sudden fully on board with expanding the playoff to 24 teams.” If Pate is wrong here, it's because that alignment — plus the revenue case — simply outweighs public sentiment in the room Monday. That's the scenario where his prediction fails: value projections win, fan pushback gets treated as noise, and the sport gets sold a bigger tent whether the customer asked for one or not.
The moment Pate returned to most pointedly was Petitti dismissing fan polling on the record. “I'll translate for you. Piss on what you think. You'll take what we give you and you'll like it. That's essentially the attitude in the room.” Pate framed the sport's revenue as fan-driven at its root, which is exactly why he found that dismissal so galling.
The close
Pate isn't predicting doom. He's predicting a fight, and he thinks the SEC and Big Ten not being aligned means nothing is settled by Monday's meeting. “In fact, it's very possible we just stay at 12. And what a radical concept to adopt a new playoff format and wait more than two years to expand it.”
The sport doesn't owe anybody 24 teams just because 24 sounds bigger than 12. Watch the full breakdown of the Petitti sound bites in the embed above, then decide for yourself whether the room in Chicago was listening to fans or just talking past them.
