The College Football Playoff selection committee will release its initial rankings Tuesday. In theory, the members are supposed to ignore all human polls with preseason rankings. They’re not supposed to be influenced by popular opinion or talk shows or anything like that.
No, the selection committee is supposed to judge who the best teams in the country are. And they reach that judgment by whatever method they see necessary. Whether it’s resume, eye test, strength of schedule, or some combination thereof, that’s the committee’s job.
The committee also releases multiple sets of rankings as the year goes on. Starting this week, every Tuesday it will now tell us who it sees as being the best so far. This gives us critical insight into the thought processes of the committee’s members.
After all, the members of the selection committee rotate out each year, so no two selection committees are ever the same. Still, there are some clear general trends that we have noticed over the years. We’ll get to those throughout this article.
The rankings Tuesday will give us an indication of how the committee will judge teams this year. Do the voters care more about who you beat or who you lost to? Is there an added focus on strength of schedule? If so, how will the committee look at games against different teams?
We can start to answer all of these questions, and more, when we look at the initial rankings that the committee puts out. So, to prepare, let’s look at certain teams and what those teams’ rankings will tell us about the committee’s general outlook this year.
And we’ll start at the very top–with the team at the top of the Amway Coaches Poll, the Alabama Crimson Tide.
Next… What Alabama’s ranking will tell us
Eye test vs resume
Every year, one of the biggest debates in college football is the question of how good a team looks, as opposed to what it has proven on the field. These types of discussions came to a head a decade ago, as programs like Boise State and TCU consistently dominated weaker competition.
Well, we get to have the same discussion this year–and luckily for us, the selection committee will give us their thoughts early. Alabama has as weak a resume at this point in the season as we’ve ever seen from a top team. The Crimson Tide have been a solid No. 1 in the Amway Coaches Poll since Clemson disappointed early in the year, and were only recently overtaken by LSU’s strong resume in the AP Poll. However, Alabama’s actual resume is, well, bad. Really bad.
According to the widely-respected Sagarin ratings, Alabama’s current strength of schedule is No. 59. That’s actually pretty mediocre, barely ahead of Clemson and behind teams like Ohio State, LSU, and Penn State.
Other rankings, though, have Alabama far worse. The Colley Matrix–what I have long called the best pure wins-and-losses-only strength of schedule rankings out there, currently has Alabama with the 118th-best schedule, one of the worst in college football.
Now, Alabama will face LSU this week, and will also still face Auburn and (potentially) Georgia in the SEC Championship Game. The Crimson Tide’s strength of schedule will certainly rise between now and December. The committee won’t be judging on that, though. It will be judging based on the body of work so far.
But wherever the committee puts Alabama will tell us a lot about what this committee says about strength of resume as opposed to purely using the eye test. I, personally, expect to see a synthesis of the two options. I think we’ll see LSU at No. 1, Ohio State at No. 2, and Alabama at No. 3. That will send a message that resume matters, but that superlative play can overcome a resume. If we see Alabama up at No. 1, then we’ll know that the committee is grading teams (or at least Alabama) based purely on how they look, not on their resume. And if Alabama is also below Clemson and maybe even Penn State, then we’ll know that this year’s committee is serious about valuing the resume over the eye test.
Next… Georgia and Oklahoma show whether wins or losses matter more
Quality wins vs bad losses
The selection committee was very consistent about one thing in its first three seasons–it cared far more about a who you beat than who you lost to. The committee prioritized ranking teams based on the quality of their wins. Losses clearly came into account, and it was rare to see a team ranked ahead of another team with fewer losses, but when judging teams with similar number of losses, the quality of the wins was what mattered most. Teams could be punished for bad losses, but wins greatly outweighed those.
In a way, this was the most radical change that the CFP brought about. It simultaneously rewarded big games (including nonconference games) and didn’t punish a team too much for one bad week. This trend is likely what got Ohio State into the Playoff in 2014 (that and the fact that the Buckeyes had a better SOS than Baylor and TCU), and it really was a driving force in the rankings the next two years.
In 2017 and 2018, the committee shied away from that a little, as Buckeye fans know all too well. Still, it’s hard to know if it was the bad losses that kept Ohio State out of the CFP the last two years, or whether it’s the fact that those bad losses were also blowouts. Did the committee, overall, change its outlook on quality wins vs bad losses? Or were Ohio State’s losses so overwhelmingly bad that they outweighed the general trend of prioritizing wins?
Whichever it is, Oklahoma and Georgia (and, to a lesser extent, Wisconsin and Michigan) will show us what the committee thinks on this topic. Georgia has better wins but also a far worse loss. Will the committee reward the wins or punish the loss? Will Wisconsin be ahead of Michigan because of the head-to-head and the quality wins? Or will the fact that Michigan has better losses keep the Wolverines ahead?
Next… The Pac 12 and how to judge SOS
Utah and Oregon SOS
The selection committee has never had any concrete strength of schedule numbers that it uses. Voters are more than welcome to look around for numbers (and I’m sure they all at least glance at FPI and Sagarin, because those are the two most often quoted in college football media), but there is no official SOS number and no actual number has ever been quoted by the committee spokesman.
Instead, it seems pretty clear that the committee eyeballs its SOS numbers. Voters look at a team’s schedule and their opponents’ records, and judges or compares based on that what type of schedule is better. This method does lead to some quirks. For example, it tends to overvalue a schedule that plays a few very good teams and a bunch of cupcakes, and can lead to undervaluing teams that play a lot of decent opponents, but no great ones.
For this week’s rankings, the placement of Oregon and Utah will show us just how the committee is looking at teams’ SOS (Oregon more so than Utah.) The Pac 12 has a lot of pretty good teams, but very few great ones. Therefore, neither Oregon nor Utah has a single ranked win so far this year. The best victory for both of them is Washington, likely the best 5-4 team in the country.
How will the committee judge these two Pac 12 teams? Will they look at a pretty strong Oregon schedule that just happens to have no top-end quality and recognize that it’s tough to go 8-1 against that schedule, even if no particular game jumps out as being a tough one? Or will they see a schedule where Oregon faced eight straight teams it should beat, and view doing that as nothing special?
Based on history, the committee will likely do the latter. If it does give Oregon a high ranking, though, that will help us see that the committee is looking at SOS as a totality of a team’s schedule, not just a rating of how hard each individual game is.
(In a way, where the committee ranks Ohio State and LSU could show something similar. LSU has the better top-end wins, but Ohio State has played an overall tougher schedule.)
Next… Is the AAC really a “Power 6” conference?
Ranking AAC teams
It has, year after year, been very hard for Group of 5 teams to earn any respect from the selection committee. From the very beginning, we’ve seen undefeated Group of 5 teams (like Marshall in 2014) not be ranked until late in the year.
In a way, that’s been deserved. The vast majority of the time, even the best Group of 5 teams have very weak schedules and resumes. Top-to-bottom, Group of 5 conferences don’t stack up to any Power 5 conferences.
Until this year.
The American Athletic Conference has four teams ranked in both major polls, and most computer ratings have it even with or ahead of the ACC so far this year. The human voters haven’t fully respected that, though, as every ranked AAC team is far below where those teams would be if they had identical resumes but were in a power conference.
What will the selection committee do? Will Cincinnati, Memphis, SMU, and Navy all end up towards the very back of the rankings, like they are in the AP and Coaches’ Polls? Or will a team like Memphis, with wins over Navy and SMU, get the high ranking that it would if it was a P5 team?
The committee will answer all of these questions Tuesday night. And the way it answers them will shape our perceptions of the entire season moving forward.
