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A new Group of Six team could crack the College Football Playoff.
The Mountain West Conference has received a lot of attention in the last 72 hours with North Dakota State joining the league.
While critics may call the Mountain West watered down with the Pac-12 departures, such as Boise State, the Mountain West could land the Group of Six spot in the next College Football Playoff. That’s the prediction of ESPN’s Bill Connelly in January right after the season, where he has the Hawaii Rainbows winning the Mountain West and making the College Football Playoff.
“Surprise! Picking Tulane would have been too easy — plus, I didn’t necessarily love the school’s new head coaching hire Will Hall —so let’s go with some new blood,” Connelly wrote. “Timmy Chang’s Rainbow Warriors began and ended the 2025 season with wins over power-conference opponents (even if they were just Stanford and Cal), and Hawai’i was awfully fun to watch.”
“Granted, it lost star receiver Jackson Harris (LSU) and dynamite punter Billy Gowers (Indiana) to the portal, but coordinator Dennis Thurman’s defense was the better unit in 2025, and if quarterback Micah Alejado can remain healthy (he missed two games and played hurt in others), he’s a firecracker,” Connelly added. “So we’ll say Hawai’i beats Stanford and Arizona State, wins the new-look Mountain West, and becomes a playoff success story.”
Hawaii will have an added challenge in the Mountain West now with the Bison, which has a 9-5 record against FBS programs during a dominant run in the FCS with 10 championships in the past 15 years.
Scheduling is Key For Group of Six
Tulane and James Madison getting blasted in the College Football Playoff first round didn’t help the Group of Six cause for future playoffs, but teams succeeding against Power Four conference teams in non-conference action could make a difference down the road. The problem is scheduling as Connelly pointed out.
“It’s pretty hard for a good mid-major program to schedule power-conference opponents — those power teams are probably looking for a win, after all — and it’s going to get even trickier with the SEC and ACC (sort of) moving to nine-game conference schedules,” Connelly wrote. “There are now fewer total slots available, and there’s even less motivation to schedule a tough mid-major game. But the committee will still clearly favor the teams that managed to snag one of those contests.”
Pac-12 Considered Group of Six For Now
While the Pac-12 is a storied conference, the major shakeup and rebuild of the conference now makes it more of mid-major league instead of a power conference.
The addition of Boise State helps with some past College Football Playoff and a major bowl pedigree, but the drop off is big after that. That’s including Oregon State and Washington, which don’t have storied histories of winning big despite being longtime Pac-12 teams.
Connelly mentioned Washington State, which went 7-6 last season, as one of the 14 Group of Six programs that scheduled two or more Power Four conference teams last season and had a winning record. None of the teams moving from the Mountain West fit that bill, including Boise State, which had a road loss at Notre Dame in 2025.
Matthew Davis covers the NFL, WNBA and college sports for Heavy.com. As a contributing writer to the StarTribune, he has also covered Minnesota prep sports since 2016. More about Matthew Davis
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