Josh Pate turns the College Football Playoff bracket into a rivalry debate, and Ohio State is the flashpoint

What would a “perfect” College Football Playoff bracket look like if the goal were not just to crown a champion, but to manufacture the most compelling rivalries on the biggest stages? That is the premise behind an episode of the Josh Pate Show, where Josh Pate assembled what he called a fantasy bracket for the 2026-27 College Football Playoff and then used it to argue a familiar point of contention for college football audiences.

Pate’s framing, as described in his segment’s write-up, centers on whether Ohio State belongs in that idealized bracket. The debate is not presented as an official projection by the College Football Playoff selection committee. Instead, it is an attempt to run the sport’s storylines through a single postseason sieve, prioritizing long-running tensions, recognizable programs, and the kinds of matchups that tend to dominate discussion even when the teams are not in the same neighborhood of the standings.

In college football, “bracket” thinking is most common after the committee’s selections, when the only real argument left is which path is easier and which quarterfinal shapes the title picture. Pate’s approach flips that order. By building a hypothetical bracket in advance, he turns the playoff into a thought experiment, asking fans to decide whether maximizing rivalry value is the same as maximizing competitive fairness.

The episode’s headline question, “Can the perfect 2026-27 College Football Playoff bracket not have Ohio State in it?” underscores the way Ohio State operates in the sport’s popular imagination. The Buckeyes are not just a team with national recruiting reach and postseason history, they are also a recurring participant in the matchups that other programs want to avoid or to seek. When Pate asks fans to consider leaving them out of a “perfect” field, the provocation is largely about what a playoff is supposed to reward, and who is allowed to be left out when the sport’s unofficial mythology keeps re-inserting them.

The segment also reflects a broader trend in modern college football media. The playoff has expanded into an entire offseason conversation, with podcasts, shows, and message boards turning the committee’s eventual framework into a canvas for speculation. Fantasy brackets and “what if” fields are popular because they merge two different kinds of fandom. One group cares most about resumes, conferences, and competitive balance. Another group cares most about matchups, legacy, and the specific rivalries that turn a postseason game into a cultural event.

Still, it is important to keep the limits clear. A fantasy bracket is entertainment, not adjudication, and it does not carry the constraints the committee uses when selecting teams and determining seeding considerations. Even in a debate about “perfect” brackets, the real postseason reality still hinges on what teams do on the field, the conference championship outcomes, and how the committee weighs results when multiple teams claim similar cases.

For viewers, the best part of Pate’s exercise is that it puts a spotlight on how different fans define “perfect.” If you treat perfection as the highest-probability path to a national title, Ohio State becomes harder to exclude. If you treat perfection as the most satisfying set of postseason narratives, excluding a power program can be a way to open the door to a different set of matchups. The answer, in other words, says as much about the bracket-builder as it does about the teams.

What to watch next is whether this kind of rivalry-driven bracket talk remains a sideshow or becomes a measurable influence on how fans interpret the playoff race. As the 2026-27 season approaches, expect the same questions to resurface during conference storylines: not only who qualifies, but who is “allowed” into the ideal version of the postseason. That is the debate Pate has kindled, and it will not be limited to one team or one episode.