Ranking 136 college football teams before bowls, and how it shows where the CFP went wrong
The College Football Playoff selection committee dug itself into too many holes.
The most dramatic and second-most-controversial playoff reveal (sorry, Florida State) put Alabama and Miami in the field and left out Notre Dame, moving the Hurricanes above the Irish even though Miami and Notre Dame didn’t play last week.
As someone who ranks 136 teams every week, I believe the committee members did a poor job along the way. You can make a perfectly fine case for the teams they chose at the end, but the weekly process was a mess, because I know the experience.
If they’d followed my ranking process and my results, they could have avoided many of their problems. But by overthinking things and working backward for some explanations, it made the experience more difficult for everyone. I’ll explain.
With conference championships complete, here is this week’s Athletic 136.
The only change in my top 10 is Indiana and Ohio State flipping at the top. I not only had Miami ahead of Notre Dame, as I argued all season, but I had Notre Dame in the field and Alabama outside at No. 11, with a chance to win its way in with the SEC Championship Game. Had the committee set it up that way, the final result would’ve been palatable. It was the act of flipping Miami and Notre Dame without either team playing that was the problem and understandably upset Irish fans. The committee deemed Notre Dame better, then didn’t, without any new data.
It should have been done weeks ago. I never flipped them in the first place. When Miami lost to SMU, I kept the Hurricanes one spot ahead of Notre Dame, leaning on that head-to-head result so as to avoid the problem the committee created for itself when it debuted the Irish and Hurricanes eight spots apart, despite both being 6-2.
I do believe this year’s Notre Dame team could’ve won the national championship. The Irish won’t get that shot.
Head-to-head, generally, is the anchor of my rankings. It’s the realest data point we have. It’s why we play the games. But when the committee ranked Oklahoma and Alabama based on head-to-head but not Miami/Notre Dame and in some weeks Texas/Vanderbilt, it became difficult to figure out what mattered most. It felt like they’d realized they started Notre Dame too high, then had to work around that the rest of the year.
It’s what I go through every week when I spend hours putting this together. It’s a puzzle, and you have to know that a decision you make one week will impact the following weeks. You need to avoid realizing you have to make an arbitrary switch (which has happened to me with occasional mistakes lower in the table). The committee came to that realization too late at the most important spot.
It’s an argument against in-season CFP rankings. For all the people who hate preseason rankings, CFP chair Hunter Yurachek admitted one reason the committee started Miami so low was because the Hurricanes had lost two of three games entering the first rankings.
I personally don’t mind the idea of the committee, and I like the transparency of the weekly rankings show. I wish they’d give us more transparency with team sheets like in basketball. But as someone who participates in ranking teams, I just wish they’d done a cleaner job.
Elsewhere in the CFP, I do have Oregon two spots lower than the committee because of the Ducks’ lack of top-level wins. Ole Miss has the win against Oklahoma, and Texas A&M has the Notre Dame win.
I didn’t have Alabama in the CFP field going into conference championship weekend for a few reasons. One, the Tide’s Week 1 loss to Florida State got so much worse with time, by far the worst of any team ranked ahead of them. And two, Alabama just hadn’t been playing well since late October. Yes, the Georgia and Vanderbilt wins were good, but in the second half of the year, Alabama needed to rally late to beat South Carolina, played ugly against LSU, lost to Oklahoma and needed a fourth-down touchdown and a late fumble to escape a 5-7 Auburn. The 28-7 loss to Georgia in the SEC Championship Game secured my feelings on that. But the committee kept Alabama in, so the Tide have a shot.
It really is Alabama’s loss to Oklahoma and the ACC’s tiebreakers that messed things up for the committee. Something different either way would’ve put Notre Dame and maybe even BYU in the field. Instead, Notre Dame got left out, and two Group of 5 teams got in with James Madison joining Tulane.
People will argue to alter the rules for the G5 getting two bids, especially if this field leads to two first-round blowouts, but it’s not their fault. It was another trickle-down failure of conference realignment. Remember that. The problem was that a top-10 Miami didn’t play for the ACC title against a top-20 Virginia, the result of oversized conferences with not enough league games. A Duke team that went 0-1 against the other top-six teams in the league made it into the title game instead.
Elsewhere, Tulane bumps up to No. 19 for beating North Texas in the American Conference championship, and James Madison inches up to No. 20 for winning the Sun Belt.
Duke’s ACC championship win moves the Blue Devils up a couple spots to No. 40, while UConn slides up with them thanks to the earlier head-to-head win. Boise State leaps up for its Mountain West championship win over UNLV, the Broncos’ second victory over the Rebels this season. Arizona State also moves up a few spots and ahead of Iowa State solely because of a head-to-head oversight last week (remember what I mentioned above, my bad).
Kennesaw State and Jacksonville State flip spots after the Owls beat the Gamecocks in a thrilling Conference USA championship. It took a fourth-and-14 conversion with the game on the line, and the teams have now split their matchups this season.
Western Michigan also climbs for its MAC championship win against Miami (Ohio). The Broncos were the best team in the MAC all year and proved it at the end.
Can’t wait for bowl games.
