Did Boise State get eliminated from College Football Playoff contention before Week 1 really gets underway?
The No. 25 Broncos lost 34-7 at South Florida on Thursday night in an ugly performance. Boise State turned the ball over three times and failed on four fourth-down attempts as South Florida dominated the final three quarters.
Boise State made the playoff last season as the top non-power conference team in the College Football Playoff rankings. The Broncos won the Mountain West and took top-seeded Oregon to the wire in Week 2. With Heisman runner-up Ashton Jeanty, the Broncos were one of the best teams in college football before losing to Penn State in the Fiesta Bowl.
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Jeanty wasn’t on the field Thursday night, but explaining the loss isn’t as simple as saying Boise State was missing its star rusher. QB Maddux Madsen was just 25-of-46 passing for 225 yards and fumbled the ball on a fourth down in the fourth quarter deep in USF territory to erase any chance of a comeback.
The Broncos entered the season as the prohibitive favorites to be the top-ranked Group of Six champion in the rankings again. And they’re still probably the favorites in the Mountain West given all the turnover at UNLV ahead of the 2025 season.
But getting back to the playoff may be an impossible mountain to climb. Even if Boise State can run the table in the Mountain West, the Broncos travel to Notre Dame in October. There was little to take from Thursday night to make you think Boise State could pull the upset in South Bend.
If the Group of Six representative in the playoff this season isn’t going to be Boise State, it’s likely to be a team from the American. And USF showed on Thursday night why the conference is clearly fifth-best in college football.
In fact, USF is now in a stronger playoff position than Boise. Yes, the Bulls have games at No. 15 Florida and No. 10 Miami over the next two weeks. They’re going to be significant underdogs in both of them. But if USF can hang in one or both of those games, the playoff committee is going to take notice.
And that will only further benefit the American. The conference was out of the playoff a year ago because of Army’s strength of schedule and because both Memphis and Tulane each had two regular-season losses. This year, it’s very possible that a two-loss American champion will get into the playoff because of what USF just did.
Will that team be USF? Maybe. The early signs are certainly promising. But for a conference that’s long wanted to be viewed as an equal to the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC, Thursday night was a big step toward a chance at the national championship.
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