Across five weeks of the stretch run of college football, every fan base and media member in the country turns into an amateur audio forensics expert.
On Tuesday evenings throughout November, we listen to every comment, parse every answer and try to discern the smallest breadcrumbs from the College Football Playoff selection committee chair.
This year, however, there’s already one guiding force for this year’s committee, and it’s quite different from past editions that valued teams’ ceiling on the field.
In 2025, it’s not who you beat, it’s about who beat you.
That’s especially bad news for No. 13 Miami’s angry supporters who still cannot scarcely believe the Hurricanes beat No. 9 Notre Dame to open the season but it appears meaningless in the eyes of the committee.
“I think when you look at Notre Dame and Miami, we really compare the losses of those two teams. Miami has lost to two unranked teams,” new selection committee chair Hunter Yurachek said on ESPN. “We really haven’t compared those two teams, they haven’t been in similar comparative pools to date. But Miami is creeping up to where they will be compared to Notre Dame. If something happens above them.”
And if chalk happens?
That result at Hard Rock Stadium in Week 1 might as well be vacated by the NCAA at this point. What other reason is there for such a game if you’re going to constantly give more credit to a team for the loss rather than the one who wins a game?
Only in college football can such logic be reverse engineered into making sense.
In recent years the committee has been fairly consistent in valuing a team’s résumé with regards to who they beat. That’s why there has been a constant discussion of how many Top 25 wins a team had racked up or how well they played against opponents ranked ahead of them in the rankings.
But not with this group, which has changed ever so slightly from last week to this one after Baylor AD Mack Rhoades exited, Yurachek was handed the spokesman’s duties and Utah athletic director Mark Harlan was called in from the bullpen.
That shift doesn’t seem to have altered the outlook because the committee has at least been consistent in talking about those losses far more than highlighting wins for bubble teams.
How else do you explain Georgia Tech sitting at No. 16, one of the teams likely to represent the ACC but is just a spot above three-loss Texas? Losing to NC State was always going to weigh the Yellow Jackets down, but that’s a ship’s anchor at this point. The same with fellow conference rival Virginia, which didn’t move up an inch in the rankings after blowing out Duke last Saturday because of, well, losses.
“Virginia had an impressive win against a Duke team that’s at the top half of the ACC. Duke is now 5–5, and then Louisville with another loss fell out of our rankings. That was a significant win at the time for Virginia,” Yurachek said. “So you look at Virginia’s résumé, they are 9–2. Their schedule strength lagged behind some of the teams that are in front of them. Then the losses to NC State, and even Wake Forest at 7–3, I think impact where Virginia’s currently ranked.”
It was an impressive win for the Cavaliers this past week for sure, but those dang losses.
As much as that seems to ding the ACC for eating its own, it’s great news for the Big 12 to potentially get the inside track on a second playoff bid because all of that conference’s contenders are simply losing to each other. No matter if the likes of No. 11 BYU and No. 12 Utah have many Top 25 wins—they have just one apiece—the fact that they have some terrific quality losses may be enough to keep them ahead of the Hurricanes.
“I mean, Utah, they’ve lost two games this season, one to No. 5 Texas Tech, the other to No. 11 BYU. Comparatively, Miami’s lost two games, one at home to an unranked Louisville and one on the road against an unranked SMU,” Yurachek said. “I think the differentiator is the losses that Utah has versus the losses that Miami has.”
Somehow we spent an entire offseason debating if strength of schedule was being valued enough by the committee, and this year’s edition is turning around to tell us that it actually means zilch as long as you only lose to good teams instead of unranked ones.
Take No. 7 Oregon. The Ducks are still somehow getting credit for beating a Penn State team that has fallen off considerably since being a preseason favorite to win the national title, fired its coach and likely won’t even go bowling this season. The Ducks, meanwhile, are not punished hardly at all for losing to the committee’s No. 2 team at home in Indiana.
And then there’s the reason why the Irish are sitting one spot ahead of No. 10 Alabama this week. Is it because the Tide have wins over the Nos. 4, 14 and 20 teams in the rankings? No, it’s the result of … that dreadful loss to Florida State in the opener.
“You look at the games that Alabama has struggled in, starting the season against Florida State, where they struggled with the ball,” Yurachek said. “That’s two really good 8–2 teams, but I think you look at the losses of Notre Dame versus the losses of Alabama, and that was really one of the defining metrics that we used.”
If we’re simply putting teams in order of wins and losses, well, the BCS computers were plenty capable of doing that with far less fuss and needing to hold every answer up to the light for clues.
“When you look at how we have these teams ranked right now, you’ve got three undefeated teams, one, two, three. You have four one-loss teams at four through seven. Then you have that grouping of three really good 8–2 teams,” Yurachek said.
You don’t say? With an order like that, the committee’s job seems moot if that’s all they’re going to consider.
Just when it looked like Miami fans could start to get their hopes up and ponder a world where they climbed high enough to be an at-large choice, they were dashed on Tuesday night.
Maybe the Hurricanes should have just lost to Notre Dame because it doesn’t appear it would have made much of a difference when good losses trump great wins.
More College Football on Sports Illustrated
Listen to SI’s new college sports podcast, Others Receiving Votes, below or on Apple and Spotify. Watch the show on SI’s YouTube channel.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Why Miami’s Win Over Notre Dame Means Nothing to a CFP Committee Obsessed With Losses.
