Here’s an initial reaction to Tuesday night’s latest College Football Playoff rankings, which will occur every week in this space through the end of the regular season:
The first thing that really stands out in the selection committee’s rankings this week is Notre Dame. This shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. If you saw my Bubble Watch or the stats ESPN put on the screen, it is clear that Notre Dame’s resume is pretty impeccable at this point. The Irish’s only loss is on the road by two points to the No. 1 team. They have two wins (Navy and Temple) over teams placed in this week’s committee rankings, and a third over a team that should be right outside the top 25 (USC). Jeff Long pointed out that they were solidly at No. 4, which makes perfect sense.
What does being No. 4 mean for Notre Dame, though?
We have to remember the end of last year, when TCU fell from No. 3 on the final weekend of the season. The one factor in that TCU drop many people neglect to mention is that TCU faced the worst team that any of the top contenders faced that week. Over the next two weeks, Notre Dame will face two of its weakest opponents of the season. It will give plenty of teams a chance to move up on them. We have learned that a win, even a blowout win, over a bad team is not guaranteed to keep you ranked at the spot you had last week. Notre Dame and its fans would do well to remember that right now.
The Big 12 seems to be getting a lack of respect from the committee again, but this will sort itself out. As Rece Davis emphasized, Baylor has yet to beat a team with a winning record. Jeff Long reiterated this. The Big 12, right now, just doesn’t have any teams with the quality wins that should earn a top ranking. This will sort itself out eventually. If either Baylor or Oklahoma State wins out, they will be in the Playoff. If there is a one-loss champion from that conference, though, things could get very dicey again.
In fact, if the committee is doing anything wrong with how it is approaching the Big 12 in general and Baylor in particular, it is that the Bears are overrated. The committee put Baylor at No. 6 this week. The Houston Cougars sit all the way back at No. 24. This is a blatant inconsistency in the committee’s rankings. Both teams have yet to beat a ranked team. While Baylor has certainly been better at blowing out teams than Houston has, it hasn’t been by a significant enough difference to justify an 18-spot gap in the rankings. Compare the resumes in my Bubble Watch (linked above).
Right now, there is not much of a difference. As I mentioned, this will become moot if Baylor wins out, but right now, it seems that Baylor is being accommodated far more than it is being snubbed.
The next big topic that we should talk about from the committee’s rankings is how they treat teams who lose a game. Five teams in this week’s rankings lost last week. Four of them dropped pretty significantly. One of them stayed in the same place. Florida State remaining at 16 is a little baffling, to say the least. Maybe the committee feels uncomfortable punishing the Noles too much for playing tough against the No. 1 team in the country. However, right now the Seminoles have no notable wins on their resume, one pretty horrible loss, and one good loss. That resume is just not as good as a lot of teams behind them.
Actually, it was a little surprising that some other teams who lost did not drop farther. Last year, we saw teams who picked up bad losses fall as many as nine spots, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Memphis fell eight spots for getting blown out by Navy, or that TCU fell seven spots for getting dominated by Oklahoma State. On the other hand, Michigan State, which just lost to a 4-6 Nebraska team, fell only six spots.
It feels a little like the committee drops a team for a loss based on how much it lost by, and less by means of putting the resume up for debate. Otherwise, I’m not sure why LSU, with the No. 2 resume last week, suddenly has the ninth-best resume after losing on the road to Alabama.
Last year, we noticed a trend that the committee didn’t parse through teams as closely when it came to the back of the rankings. It looks like they’re doing that again. I won’t point out every single question we could ask about the rankings, but the one glaring team in there that has to be addressed is Wisconsin.
UW’s best win on the season is against Illinois. Yes, the Badgers don’t have any bad losses. In fact, they have just about the best combination of two losses possible. However, they have no wins of any value whatsoever. Even Baylor and Houston have better wins than Wisconsin has. The fact is, if the committee wants to send a message that it matters whom you beat, it can’t rank Wisconsin. The message being sent instead right now is that taking care of cupcakes but losing your important games will get you ranked. The same arguments could apply, though to a lesser extent, to Mississippi State.
Why does it matter so much whom the committee has in the back end of their rankings? Well, one of the facts that has seemed to be most important to the committee in the last year is wins over ranked teams. While I hope the committee realizes that a win over whoever came in at 26 for them is practically as valuable as a win over their No. 25 team, it still is much more glaring when you can look at the record against teams that actually show up in those rankings.
The final topic that is garnering much immediate discussion is Iowa’s appearance at No. 5. A lot of people seem to be very surprised, because Iowa plays a very “boring” brand of football and the Hawkeyes are perceived to play in a very weak division. However, they still have two wins over ranked teams (my above rant about Wisconsin’s ranking notwithstanding), as well as two more non-conference victories over Power 5 teams. Iowa may not have many top-end wins to speak of, but it does have a large number of solid wins. If you saw the Bubble Watch (cited above), you would see that the Hawkeyes have a decent SOS and only three wins over true cupcakes, something not many undefeated and one-loss teams in the discussion can claim right now.
Iowa’s jump is significant, though, because it does show a slight shift in thought among the committee members. Last week, Long mentioned that Baylor was ahead of Iowa because the Bears had “a more explosive offense.” In essence, last week the committee felt that Baylor’s situation was more sustainable than Iowa’s. Now, though, that has been reversed. Either the committee now has more faith in Iowa than it had last week (not so likely, given that Iowa did not beat Indiana by a significant margin); they have less faith in Baylor than it had last week; or it decided that comparing these two teams the way it did last week wasn’t the right way to approach ranking them.
It’s impossible to know what it really was (and it always could have been a case of different factors for different committee members), but whether there is any correlation between a team’s style of play and where it is ranked is definitely something to keep an eye on moving forward.
