On December 11, 2025 — three days before the bracket dropped — Bill Connelly published a column for ESPN titled The G5 Window Is Open. The column made one specific prediction: that a Group of Five program would win at least one first-round CFP game, by a small margin, against an SEC opponent.
The prediction was widely dismissed at the time. The SEC had four teams in the bracket. The G5 had one. The arithmetic looked straightforward.
Boise State 26, Auburn 23.
That was the actual score, on the actual scoreboard, in the actual first-round game in the actual stadium in late December. It was not the matchup Connelly named — he had paired Tulane against Texas A&M in his hypothetical — but the structural prediction (G5 over SEC, small margin, first round) was correct.
We are flagging this because Connelly's call falls into the rarest category of prediction: the kind that sounded contrarian when it landed, looked silly for about three weeks, and then aged into being the most accurate single read of December's bracket from any major voice in the sport.
Tracking calls like this is, in the long run, what Receipts is for. The first receipt of this edition. The first of many.