The Fantasy Life College Football Playoff projections have been released ahead of CFP Week 12. This year's expanded 12-team College Football Playoff will feature five automatic bids for the highest-ranked conference champions, with the remaining seven spots filled by the next highest-ranked teams overall. The top four teams will advance directly to the quarterfinals.

Here are Thor Nystrom's thoughts on the latest the CFP ranks via the weekly Betting Life show. Be sure to tune in Saturdays at 10 a.m ET for our live YouTube pregame show, and if you have any questions or comments, hit Thor up on X at @thorku.

Fantasy Life College Football Playoff Projections

Fantasy Life's CFP projections system views the following 12 teams as the favorites to earn bids to the College Football Playoff heading into Week 12. 

Colorado In Line For a Bye?

Yeah, this one surprised even me — these are not my opinions. This is our projection system and there will be differences between our College Football Playoff projection and what the committee is doing Tuesday. We know that the committee will give its opinion on what the bracket would look like if it was being set tomorrow. 

Still, this one was a stunner to me when we ran the numbers. Colorado has ascended to be becoming the Big 12 champion in our projections, which would slot them into a bye in that 4-seed in the first round. And there was a big shakeup in the Big 12 this past weekend.

Iowa State suffered another upset loss courtesy of my Kansas Jayhawks. That's their second loss in a row, which knocks them out of a projected spot in the Big 12 title game and gives it to Colorado. That gives us a projection of Colorado against BYU, and we had Colorado winning that game. So that would be absolutely incredible. 

We'll talk about the Heisman odds on Thursday, but Travis Hunter has now pulled into the pole position, and I said it all year: I don't think he can win that award unless Colorado makes the College Football Playoff. They now have a clear shot to get there, so this is going to be fascinating to watch. 

Big 12 vs. ACC in CFP Projection

Last week, we went 12-for-12 — we talked about these last Monday and we had all 12 teams in that the committee did. I'll be very interested to see what happens this week after other big schools (like LSU) were knocked out.

In addition, Colorado beat Texas Tech, then Iowa State lost and BYU had all kinds of problems with Utah. They did get through, though. We have BYU in the field right now, along with Colorado. 

So that might surprise some people that we now have two Big 12 teams in there and only the one ACC team. And, of course, the rest are the Big Ten, Big 12, and Notre Dame, the independent. But it'll be interesting to see if this time we were correct or if the committee has a surprise in store.