FATAL FOUR
Rules

The rules

PICK THE FEWEST TEAMS THAT WILL CONTAIN ALL FOUR PLAYOFF SEMIFINALISTS.

Miss even one, your bubble pops. Smallest surviving bubble wins.

Linked for reference. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced by the show.

The game

Pick the fewest teams that will contain all four College Football Playoff semifinalists. Miss even one, your bubble pops. Smallest surviving bubble wins.

How it works

  1. Build your bubble. Choose at least 4 FBS teams — four semifinalists means four teams is the floor, and a 4-team bubble that survives is unbeatable. There's no maximum, but every team you add is a team you might lose to.
  2. Crown a champion. Pick your national champion from inside your own bubble. It's your tiebreaker.
  3. Edit freely until lock. Teams, champion, bubble name — change anything you want before the lock. At the lock instant, everything freezes for the season. No exceptions, no grace period.
  4. Survive. When the four semifinalists are set, any bubble missing even one of them has popped. Popped bubbles are ranked among themselves (fewest semifinalists missed, then smallest bubble) but can't win.
  5. Win. The smallest surviving bubble in your group wins. If everyone in a group survives, the biggest bubble loses — yes, even though they were right.
  6. Ties. Tied on size? The correct champion pick wins the tie. Still tied? Co-winners — both of you get it. Earlier submission is listed first, but it's a shared title.

The fine print

  • One bubble per person, per season. It's your entry in every group you join.
  • Your bubble becomes visible to everyone when bubbles lock. Before then, nobody sees it unless you choose to share it yourself. Sharing before lock means someone could copy you — that's your call; if they do, you're listed ahead of them.
  • Submission times are recorded server-side and every change to every bubble is permanently logged. The pool is designed to be auditable.
  • Free to play. No entry fees, no prizes from us. The original game holds that prizes should be significant and punishments severe — that part is your group's business, settled off the platform. Don't use this platform to run wagers.
  • The number of playoff teams that count as "semifinalists" follows the CFP format for the season (four, under the current format). If the format changes mid-season, or anything else genuinely weird happens — a postseason ban, a cancelled game — site rulings are final.

This game format was popularized on Josh Pate's College Football Show. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or licensed from that show or its host.

LATE ENTRY RULES

Entries for this season closed on 29 August and cannot reopen. You can still build a bubble as a late entry. It plays by the rules above, with five differences.

  1. It doesn't count toward the season. It is labelled that way everywhere it appears — your page, your friends' groups, and anything you share.
  2. It locks the moment you save it. There is no window to change your picks, because there is nobody left to wait for.
  3. You name it once. Bubbles entered on time froze their names at the lock; yours freezes when you save.
  4. It gets a Pop Index like any other bubble — the number measures your teams and nothing else, so entering late costs you nothing there. Where you'd have placed is reported in the conditional, because you were never in the running.
  5. It carries the date you made it, and how open the playoff picture still was that day. A bubble built in December was an easier bet than one built in August, and the page says so.

Everything else is the same: one bubble per person, at least four teams, one champion. Late entries close on 6 December, when the bracket is announced and the answer stops being a guess.

Rules version 2026.1. These are the rules for the 2026 season; they are frozen at lock and do not change under anyone who has already entered.

Build your bubble