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David Hale, ESPN Staff Writer
It’s a new era for the College Football Playoff, with the field growing from four to 12 this year. That means three times as many programs will gain entry, but, beginning with Tuesday’s initial playoff rankings, there’s three times as much room for outrage, too.
Under the old rules, there was a simple line of demarcation that separated the elated from the angry: Who’s in?
Now, there are so many more reasons for nitpicking the committee’s decisions, from first-round byes to hosting a home game to whether your supposedly meaningful conference has been eclipsed by those vagrants from the Group of 5.
And if the first rankings are any indication, it’s going to be a fun year for fury. There’s little logic to be taken from the initial top 25 beyond the committee’s clear love for the Big Ten. Penn State and Indiana make the top eight despite having just one win over an ESPN FPI top 40 team combined (Penn State over Iowa). That Ohio State checks in at No. 2 ahead of Georgia is the most inexplicable decision involving Georgia since Charlie Daniels suggested the devil lost that fiddle contest. Oregon is a reasonable No. 1, but the Ducks still came within a breath of losing to Boise State. Indeed, the Big Ten’s non-conference record against the Power 4 this year is just 6-8, just a tick better than the ACC and well behind the SEC’s mark of 10-6.
But this is the fun of early November rankings. The committee is still finding its footing, figuring out what to prioritize and what to ignore, what’s signal and what’s noise. And that’s where the outrage really helps. It’s certainly not signal, but it can be a really loud noise.
This week’s Anger Index:
There are only two possible explanations for BYU’s treatment in this initial ranking. The first is that the committee members are too sleepy to watch games beyond the Central Time Zone. The second, and frankly, less rational one, is they simply didn’t do much homework.
It’s certainly possible the committee members are so enthralled with metrics like FPI (where BYU ranks 28th) or SP+ (22nd) that they’ve determined the Cougars’ actual record isn’t as important. This is incredibly foolish. FPI and SP+ certainly have their value, but they’re probabilistic metrics, designed to gauge the likelihood of teams’ future success. They’re in no way a ranking of actual results. (That’s why USC is still No. 17 in FPI, despite Lincoln Riley spending his days wistfully scrolling through old pictures of Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray and wondering if Oklahoma might want to get back together.)
To look at actual results paints a clear picture.
BYU (No. 4) has a better strength of record than Ohio State (No. 5), has played roughly the same quality schedule as Texas, and has two wins against other teams ranked in the committee’s top 25 — as many as Ohio State, Texas, Penn State, Tennessee and Indiana (all ranked ahead of the Cougars) combined.
Indiana’s rags-to-riches story is wonderful, of course, but how can the committee compare what BYU has done (wins over SMU and Kansas State) against Indiana’s 103rd-ranked strength of schedule?
And this particular snub has significant effects. The difference between No. 8 and No. 9 is a home game in the first round, of course, though as a potential conference champion, that’s a moot point. But what if BYU loses a game — perhaps the Big 12 title game? That could not only doom the Cougars from getting a first-round bye, but it could quite likely set up a scenario in which the Big 12 is shuffled outside the top four conferences entirely, passed by upstart Boise State.
What’s clear from this first round of rankings is the committee absolutely loves the Big Ten — with four teams ranked ahead of a subjectively more accomplished BYU team — and the Big 12 is going to face some serious headwinds.
There’s a great, though little watched, TV show from the 2010s called “Rectify,” about a man who escapes Death Row after new evidence is found, only to be constantly harassed by the same system that fraudulently locked him away for 20 years. This is basically the story of SMU.
Let’s do a quick blind résumé here.
Team A: 8-1 record, No. 13 strength of record, two wins vs. ranked opponents, loss to SP+ No. 22, .578 opponent win%
Team B: 7-1 record, No. 15 strength of record, two wins vs. ranked opponents, loss to SP+ No. 91, .567 opponent win%
OK, you probably guessed Team A is SMU. The Mustangs have wins against Louisville and Pitt — both relatively emphatic — and their lone loss came to No. 9 BYU, which came before a QB change and included five red zone drives that amounted to just six total points.
Team B? That’s Notre Dame. The Irish have the worst loss by far (to Northern Illinois) of any team in the top 25, beat a common opponent by the same score (though, while SMU out-gained Louisville by 20 yards, the Cardinals actually out-gained Notre Dame by 115), and have played one fewer contest.
The difference? SMU has the stigma — of the death penalty, of the upstart program new to the Power Four, of being unworthy. Notre Dame is the big brand, and that results in being ranked three spots higher and — if the playoff were held today — getting in, while the Mustangs are left out.
There are three two-loss SEC teams ranked ahead of Ole Miss, which seems to be a perfectly reasonable consensus if you look at the AP poll, too. But are we sure that’s so reasonable?
Two stats we like to look at to measure a team’s quality are success rate (how often does a team make a play that improves its odds of winning) and explosiveness. Measure the differentials in each between offense and defense, then plot those out, and you’ll get a pretty clear look of who’s truly dominant in college football this year.
Explosive Play differential vs. Successful Play differential
Auburn & Ark make no sense
Iowa & Iowa St are twinsies!
Is Ole Miss undervalued? pic.twitter.com/h87SKCdOtr— 💫🅰️♈️🆔 (@ADavidHaleJoint) November 3, 2024
That outer band that features Penn State, Texas, Miami, Ohio State and Indiana (and notably, not Oregon, Alabama, LSU or Texas A&M)? That’s where Ole Miss lives.
The Rebels have two losses this year, each by 3 points, both in games they out-gained the winning team. They lost to LSU on the road and, yes, somehow lost to a dismal Kentucky team. But hey, LSU lost to USC, too. It has been a weird season.
SP+ loves Ole Miss. The Rebels check in at No. 4 there, behind only Ohio State, Texas and Georgia.
FPI agrees, ranking the Rebels fifth.
In ESPN’s game control metric, no team is better. Ole Miss has the third-best average in-game win percentage. That suggests a lot of strange twists and bad luck was involved with its losses. These are things the committee should be evaluating when comparing like teams.
But how about this comparison?
Team A: 7-2, 23 points per game scoring margin vs. FBS, 1 loss to unranked, three wins vs. SP+ top 40
Team B: 7-2, 19 points per game scoring margin vs. FBS, 1 loss to unranked, three wins vs. SP+ top 40
Pretty similar, eh?
Of course, one of them is Ole Miss. That’s Team A this time around.
Team B is Alabama, ranked five spots higher.
Sure, this situation can be resolved quite easily this weekend with a win over Georgia, but Ole Miss starting at the back of the pack of SEC contenders feels like a miss by the committee, even if the math will change substantially before the next rankings arrive.
Oh, thanks so much for the No. 25 nod, committee. All Army has done is win every game without trailing the entire season. Last year, when Liberty waltzed through its weakest-in-the-nation schedule, the committee had no objections to giving the Flames enough love to make a New Year’s Six bowl. But Army? At No. 25? Thirteen spots behind Boise State, the Knights’ competition for the Group of 5’s bid? Something tells us some spies from Air Force have infiltrated the committee’s room in some sort of Manchurian Candidate scenario.
Sure, the Seminoles are terrible now, and yes, the committee this year has plenty of new faces, but that doesn’t mean folks in Tallahassee have forgiven or forgotten what happened a year ago. Before the committee’s playoff snub, FSU had won 19 straight games and averaged 39 points per game. Since the snub, the Noles are 1-9 and haven’t 21 points. Who’s to blame for this? Mike Norvell? The coaching staff? DJ Uiagalelei and the other struggling QBs? Well, sure. But it’s much easier to just blame the committee. Those folks killed Florida State’s playoff hopes and ended their run of success. The least they could do this year is rank them No. 25 just for fun.
Also angry: South Carolina (5-3, unranked), Vanderbilt (6-3, unranked), Georgia (7-1, No. 3), Louisville (6-3, No. 22), everyone who is not in the Big Ten.
