CFP Anger Index: The teams and conference that should be most upset in Week 14

  • David Hale, ESPN Staff WriterNov 26, 2024, 08:48 PM ET

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    • College football reporter.
    • Joined ESPN in 2012.
    • Graduate of the University of Delaware.

What’s the value of a win?

This isn’t a rhetorical question. It’s something the committee should be asking on a weekly basis. We tend to discuss win-loss records in concrete terms, then debate résumés in subjective ones, and that’s where fans, pundits and, especially, the committee run into trouble.

For example, when a reporter asked Curt Cignetti if his Indiana Hoosiers still belonged in the playoff after a blowout loss to Ohio State, he responded with a mix of befuddlement and indignation. How could a team with a 10-1 record in the Big Ten not be in the playoff?

To which any critic might rightfully argue that Indiana’s one loss — by 23 to the only SP+ top-30 team on their schedule — said more about the Hoosiers than the 10 wins did.

On the other hand, there’s Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark, who this week suggested it would be an outrage if a Group of 5 champion eclipsed his conference for the final playoff bye (which might actually be the least of his problems). He rattled off his fair share of data points — strength of schedule, margin of victory, advanced metrics — that make a clear-cut case for the Big 12. The only problem? The Big 12 champ might have as many as two more losses than the Group of 5’s representative.

Or, more succinctly: The Big Ten thinks its teams are best, because they’ve lost fewer games, while the SEC thinks its teams are best, because they’ve played a tougher schedule.

So, which is it?

Let’s apply some math.

If we use the Football Power Index’s pregame win expectation, we can get an approximate “degree of difficulty” on each win.

Indiana, to Cignetti’s point, might not have beaten great teams, but winning is still hard. The odds, by the FPI, of winning all 10 of the Hoosiers’ victories come out to about 12%.

Compare that with Texas. The Longhorns have had a particularly soft schedule, too, and like Indiana, they were overmatched in their one serious test (against Georgia). Using those same FPI odds, the chances Texas would’ve won the 10 games it has are actually pretty good — 42.4%, or a little less than a coin flip.

So by that logic, Indiana’s 10-1 record is far more impressive than Texas’ 10-1 record.

Of course, those pregame win projections also account for an important variable: team quality. Indiana’s odds were lower because the FPI innately understands that Texas is a better team, in terms of talent, than Indiana.

So what if we just go by strength of schedule?

That’s tricky, too. Indiana’s schedule strength entering last week stood at an embarrassing 106th nationally. Then the Hoosiers played Ohio State, and its strength of schedule jumped to No. 51. So did the Hoosiers’ record get any more impressive as a result? Of course not! They won their 10 games against the 106th-best schedule and lost a game against, effectively, the No. 1 toughest schedule of Week 13 (though certainly Texas A&M, Ole Miss and Alabama might quibble with that analysis).

This is where ESPN’s strength-of-record metric is helpful. It accounts for both opponent strength and the actual outcome. It suggests Texas (at No. 5) is ahead of Indiana (at No. 7). But what does that actually mean? The answer is not much. If we look at the raw numbers on strength of record, Texas’ score is only about 3% better than Indiana’s. The difference is negligible — and that’s before we remember that opponent quality is both subjective and an independent variable. In other words, Texas doesn’t control how good its opponents are. Is it the Longhorns’ fault Michigan, last season’s national champion, isn’t very good in 2024? Is it Texas’ fault that, in a conference with a dozen solid teams, the SEC office handed out a schedule that featured only two genuinely good opponents? Texas is the same team regardless of who it plays. We’d just have a better gauge of how good that team is if it had played a few more quality opponents. Strength of schedule is a measure of certainty not quality.

Or, perhaps a better example: SMU has wins against Louisville and Pitt and a close loss to BYU. Three weeks ago, BYU and Pitt were undefeated and Louisville was a top-25 team. That’s a strong résumé (not that the committee noticed). But BYU has lost two straight, Pitt has dropped three in a row and Louisville delivered one of the most inexplicably disastrous losses in recent college football history against Stanford. Suddenly SMU — through absolutely no fault of its own — has a much less impressive résumé, long after the games in question were actually played.

Let’s get back to our central question then: What is a win worth?

In nearly every other sport the answer is simple. A win is worth a win, or at least a non-loss. But in college football, it’s all debatable, which is why we have a committee.

The problem, of course, is the committee debates are secret and its explanations are often paradoxical. Rankings often seem less about a genuine appreciation for what a team has done than a speculative assumption about what it might do in a hypothetical future or alternate timeline, and this season, more than any in recent memory, that seems a fool’s errand.

So here we are. After a weekend of chaos around college football — particularly in the SEC — the committee is throwing ideas against the wall and simply reporting back what stuck.

Which brings us to this week’s Anger Index.

1. The Big 12

Imagine the following scenario: Boise State and Tulane both win out, earning conference championships.

The Big 12’s champion, however, is three-loss Kansas State, three-loss Colorado or even two-loss Iowa State. All of them are currently ranked behind both Tulane (the presumed AAC champ) and Boise State (the presumed Mountain West champ), which could lead us to this eventuality: Two Group of 5 champs get in, and the Big 12 is shut out completely.

This would be a genuine catastrophe for the conference, but it’s not a major leap to envision exactly that happening.

But would it be fair?

Yormark certainly doesn’t think so.

“Based on where we sit today, I see no rationale for the Big 12’s champion not getting a first-round bye,” Yormark told Yahoo Sports. “From a strength-of-schedule standpoint, all four of our schools at the top of the standings are ranked ahead of Boise State.”

Well, sure, but the committee isn’t ranking strength of schedule, and right now, everyone but Arizona State sits behind multiple Group of 5 teams.

The problem is the committee seems incredibly concerned with the quality of losses, and in that respect, Boise State (one loss to Oregon) and Tulane (losses to Kansas State and Oklahoma) have far more explainable blemishes than Iowa State (losses to Kansas and Texas Tech), Colorado (losses to Nebraska, Kansas and Kansas State) or even Arizona State (losses to Cincinnati and Texas Tech). The great irony is Kansas State has a pretty clear-cut case to be ahead of Tulane — a 34-27 head-to-head win — but the Wildcats’ loss to Houston looks much worse than, ironically, Tulane’s loss to … Kansas State.

For more context on the committee’s willingness to engage in this circular logic, go back to 2014 when the Big 12 was also left out, despite Baylor and TCU knocking on the door.

On the other hand, seeing Coach Prime left out in favor of a team from the American might create enough hot takes to power all the holiday lights in America.

2. Every team with playoff hopes not named Clemson (9-2, No. 12)

Somehow the Tigers, left for dead after a 33-21 loss to Louisville less than a month ago, are now our first team out.

Why is that exactly?

Clemson might have the single thinnest résumé of any team in the top 25 — and worse than a handful of unranked teams, too — when you dig into the numbers.

Clemson’s best win by SP+ came against Virginia Tech, which is ranked No. 31. The Hokies, 5-6 and on the verge of missing a bowl after a loss to Virginia in Week 14, are hardly an indicator that Clemson is capable of greatness.

Clemson’s next-best win came against Pitt by four points in a game marred by controversial officiating. That’s the same Pitt currently embroiled in a four-game losing streak. Pitt is the only Power 4 team with a winning record to lose to the Tigers.

The two teams with a pulse that have played Clemson both won handily — Georgia by 31 in the opener and Louisville by 12 on Nov. 2 in Death Valley.

So, what exactly is the rationale for ranking Clemson ahead of, say, Arizona State (three wins better than Virginia Tech), BYU (two), Kansas State (three), Alabama (four), Ole Miss (three) or South Carolina (three)? Iowa State, Arizona State, Texas A&M, South Carolina, BYU and Alabama all have better strength-of-record metrics than the Tigers.

The Gamecocks will at least get a chance to prove the point on the field Saturday in the Palmetto Bowl, and given where the committee has things now, it’s entirely possible that game is a de facto play-in for the playoff.

Whether Clemson belongs in that advantageous position, however, seems a dubious proposition.

Of course, if this is all setting the stage for the committee to deviously jump Alabama over an ACC team in the final poll, then we applaud their willingness to play the long game.

Let’s do a quick blind comparison here.

Team A: 9-2, 1-1 vs. FPI top 40, losses to teams with a combined record of 18-4 by a combined 8 points

Team B: 9-2, 0-2 vs. FPI top 40, losses to teams with a combined record of 14-8 by a combined 22 points

Would it help here if we noted both of these teams are from the Group of 5, but Team A has two wins vs. Power 4 opponents and Team B has none?

Pretty easy pick, right? Team A has a clear edge. Only Team A is UNLV, which ranks No. 22 and would be at a disadvantage for a playoff bid, even if it wins out.

Team B is Tulane, which checks in at No. 17.

Heck, UNLV might even have the best case of anyone for jumping the Big 12 by virtue of wins over Kansas and Houston — two teams that have beaten BYU, Colorado, Kansas State and Iowa State.

There are 10 teams from Power 4 conferences with 8-3 records after Week 13. Eight of them are ranked. The two that aren’t are both in the ACC, outside the AP Top 25 and with ample reason to be outraged.

Team A: No. 26 strength of record, best wins vs SP+ Nos. 36 and 52, losses to SP+ Nos. 16, 41 and 55 by a total of 37 points

Team B: No. 31 strength or record, best wins vs SP+ Nos. 31 and 44, losses to SP+ Nos. 8, 13 and 61 by a total of 33 points

Pretty darned close, right? Team B, however, has the better wins and the better losses, so the only thing supporting Team A seems to be a moderately better middle of the résumé.

So, who are they?

Team B is Duke. Team A is Colorado.

Syracuse is admittedly a tougher sell because of an ugly loss to Stanford, but the Orange have wins over No. 22 UNLV and a Georgia Tech team that knocked off Miami.

And yet, neither Duke nor Syracuse is ranked.

Does it really matter? Neither would sniff the playoff anyway.

And yet, as Syracuse QB Kyle McCord told ESPN, the recognition is meaningful to a young program with a first-year coach hoping to establish an identity — a story that’s true of Duke, too.

“You want to get that recognition,” McCord said. “That’s one of our goals is to be ranked by the CFP committee.”

And it matters, too, for the other teams making a case for the playoff. Miami faces Syracuse this week. It has already defeated Duke. SMU, still criminally underappreciated by the committee, has a win over Duke, too. When “ranked wins” are a metric — fraught as it might be — it matters.

What could Notre Dame possibly have to quibble with? After all, No. 5 is as good as it gets for the Fighting Irish, who cannot, by rule, earn a first-round bye.

But here’s the problem: They’re outflanked by three Big Ten teams and narrowly ahead of perhaps the most intimidating team in the country in Georgia. And because the first four spots have to go to conference champions, we could be looking at a final ranking that looks something like this: Oregon, Georgia, ACC champion and Big 12 or Group of 5 champion get the byes, with Ohio State, Texas and Penn State next in the pecking order.

That leaves Notre Dame poised precariously on the brink of landing a home game for the playoff.

The odds are still long that the Irish would be pushed beyond the top eight, but stranger things have happened. And it really shouldn’t be a topic for debate. Notre Dame has six wins vs. opponents that are currently 7-4 or better — the most of any team in the country — and is riding a nine-game winning streak in which it outscored the opposition by an average of 33 points.

Of course, there’s still that messy incident in Week 2 when the Irish fell to Northern Illinois. If those two played 100 more times, it would surprise no one if Notre Dame won 99 of them. But there’s no ignoring what happened, and for as good as the Irish look today, they also have the worst loss of any playoff contender by a country mile.

It sure would be a shame if that loss kept them from hosting a game in northern Indiana in mid-December.

Also angry: Iowa State, Kansas State, Curt Cignetti, Greg Sankey, anyone going to the grocery store on Wednesday.

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