The final College Football Playoff rankings will be unveiled Tuesday night with the selection show to set the bracket following Sunday after the conference championship games.
And it’s going to be one stressful week for the CFP selection committee, several coaches/programs and a whole lot of fans as there is no avoiding the reality that several deserving teams will be snubbed from the 12-team bracket.
With that, we have some thoughts of our own on the task at hand for the committee, the teams in question and some changes that could help the process.
1. The CFP Committee’s Quagmire
The committee was already dealing with the Miami/Notre Dame controversy that is only getting more complicated.
As a refresher, Notre Dame (now 10-2) has been ranked ahead of Miami (10-2) from the first CFP rankings released a month ago, even though the Hurricanes beat the Fighting Irish head-to-head in Week 1 (27-24 in Miami). The reason being that Notre Dame reeled off 10 straight wins all by double-digits and its two losses were to ranked Miami and Texas A&M teams, while the Hurricanes scuffled a bit and lost to Louisville and SMU teams that were unranked at the time (later ranked and then again unranked).
But Miami has finished the season on a heater with four straight lopsided wins and closed the gap with Notre Dame in the CFP rankings from 10-18 a month ago to 15-9, 13-9 and last week 12-9.
CFP committee chair Hunter Yurachek said two weeks ago the head-to-head result between those teams was not a differentiator because they weren’t being evaluated in the same tier. Then last week he said they were evaluated in the same group along with Alabama and BYU.
And after the Hurricanes walloped a ranked Pittsburgh team 38-7 last week (after Notre Dame beat Pitt 37-15 two weeks earlier) … well, the controversy is not going away.
The only way Miami could close the gap further in the new rankings Tuesday night would be if No. 10 Alabama gets dinged for playing a tight 27-20 game with Auburn that was tied until the final minutes. It’s unlikely it would leapfrog 11-1 BYU at No. 11 — yet.
The issue gets more complicated, though, when considering Notre Dame and Miami are done, while BYU and Alabama have conference championship games this week.
BYU is going to be an underdog in the Big 12 championship game against Texas Tech as the Red Raiders won the teams’ earlier meeting 29-7. If BYU loses to Texas Tech again, it is expected to drop out of the playoff picture.
Alabama gets a rematch with Georgia (which it beat in Athens in the regular season) in the SEC championship game, meanwhile. If Alabama loses and drops to 10-3 for “having to” play an extra game, how will the committee evaluate that?
Let’s hypothetically say both BYU and Alabama lose, suddenly Notre Dame and Miami are theoretically slotted next to each other with potentially only one at-large berth available. How does the head-to-head result not come into play at that point?
As we said, though, the committee already knew it had that mess on its hands to sort through knowing full well that whatever decision it makes will be eviscerated by a large segment of fans and critics.
Then matters got even more complicated when Texas upset No. 3 Texas A&M last week, 27-17.
The Longhorns (9-3) were the highest-ranked three-loss team at No. 16 before that and considered firmly outside the playoff picture. But now?
No three-loss team earned an at-large berth last year, but Texas is making an intriguing case — and coach Steve Sarkisian won’t go down quietly.
Texas indeed would be the only team to miss the playoff with wins over two teams in the top-10 of the CFP rankings (Texas A&M and Oklahoma), plus a win over Vanderbilt (No. 14 in the last rankings) and losses to two teams (Ohio State and Georgia) likely to be ranked No. 1 and 3 this week.
Sarkisian has focused his argument on Texas choosing to play a big nonconference game vs. Ohio State rather than grab an easy win that would have it 10-2 right now, but the reality is Texas isn’t being penalized for losing to the Buckeyes — it’s being penalized for losing to 4-8 Florida.
This is why there is no perfect solution.
– Five spots go to the five highest-ranked conference champions. That would normally be the four P4 champs and the top G5 conference champ, but there is the potential the ACC gets left out of the mix entirely if 7-5 Duke beats Virginia this week (more on that next). In which case, James Madison from the Sun Belt and the AAC champion (North Texas or Tulane) would both get in, theoretically. Regardless, five spots go to automatic berths.
– The SEC is also getting 11-1 Texas A&M, 11-1 Ole Miss and 10-2 Oklahoma in, plus Georgia (11-1) if it loses the SEC championship game or potentially even still Alabama (10-2) if it loses (though, as noted, that would be more complicated). That brings us to 8-9 spots claimed.
– The Big Ten is absolutely getting the loser of No. 1 Ohio State vs. No. 2 Indiana — the only unbeaten teams left — into the playoff, along with 10-2 Oregon (No. 6 in the CFP rankings last week). That’s 10-11 spots.
– So if Alabama beats Georgia (again), that’s 11 spots with one remaining for Notre Dame, Miami and Texas (not to mention 10-2 Vanderbilt and 11-2 BYU if it loses to Texas Tech). If Georgia wins, that’s 10 sure spots with two for Notre Dame, Miami, Texas and Alabama.
Good luck to the committee on that decision.
2. The ACC Debacle
As noted, there is a doomsday scenario for the ACC if 7-5 Duke beats 10-2 Virginia, which is absolutely in play as the Cavaliers are just 3.5-point favorites (per ESPN Bet).
There’s simply no way a five-loss Duke team is ending up higher in the rankings than the AAC champion or a 12-1 James Madison team if it wins the Sun Belt. If JMU loses the Sun Belt championship to 8-4 Troy, well, let’s cross that bridge when we get there.
Besides the fact that the ACC cannibalized itself all season, the real issue here is the tiebreaker system that has Duke in the title game over better teams.
The Blue Devils were in a five-way tie for second place in the standings with Miami, SMU, Pitt and Georgia Tech and won the tiebreaker by having the highest conference opponent winning percentage (strength of schedule).
That’s silly.
Why not just make the tiebreaker in that scenario the highest team in the CFP rankings. Miami would be playing Virginia, with the chance to secure the ACC’s automatic berth, render the controversy with Notre Dame moot, etc.
That’s exactly what the AAC has in place as the tiebreaker for multiple teams with no clear head-to-head advantage.
It only makes sense.
3. The Real Issues
That tiebreaker nonsense is the ACC’s issue right now, but all of the P4 conferences share two primary issues — and with no likely solution to either.
First, conference expansion/realignment has created the reality that even teams within the same league play such different schedules and overlap on only a few opponents.
Take Miami and Duke, for instance. Even if they were the only teams in that second-place tie in the ACC, it would have had to go to a complex tiebreaker because they shared only two — TWO — common opponents. They play in the same conference and only played two of the same teams (and didn’t play each other). Both beat NC State and Syracuse.
That is one of the more extreme examples, but this is the case in all of these oversized leagues to some extent now.
There’s no chance of it being undone anytime soon, but just think how much more sense it made to have more conferences with fewer teams each (and geographical sensibility such that Cal and Miami aren’t in the same conference, nor Oregon and Rutgers, etc.)? Imagine if it was still the old ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC with seven auto berths (including the top G5 champion) and five at-large berths.
That would also ward off the other major problem for college football right now.
It’s actually better for most teams to not reach the conference championship game, which is a sad reality. Oklahoma, Ole Miss and Oregon should all be thrilled they didn’t make their respective conference championship games where another loss could knock them out of their playoff position — like the dilemma Alabama and BYU now face.
If we still had those six “power conferences” and fewer at-large berths into the playoff, then conference races and championship games would have the important they should — and used to — have.
Alas, that’s just a wistful rant at this point. The only thing that could change would be for conferences to cut out title games entirely, but then good luck deciding a conference champ (for what it’s worth) when the best teams in the massive sprawling unnecessarily large league played entirely different schedules.
Rant over.
Good luck to the CFP committee on an unenviable job ahead.
