Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard was the latest to question the College Football Playoff’s latest Week 14 rankings.
Pollard took to X and noted that Strength of Schedule is clearly no longer a data point that the College Football Playoff committee is interested in using, despite it being one of the main data points that the committee claims to use.
Pollard points out that SMU, Indiana and Boise State have Strength of Schedules that rank 75, 65, and 86, respectively, with only Indiana having a higher Strength of Schedule than Iowa State at 68.
In the Big 12, Arizona State’s is 72, while BYU’s come in at 44.
Meantime, if you go to the CFP Committee protocols website, here’s how it reads.
The committee will select the teams using a process that distinguishes among otherwise comparable teams by considering:
- Strength of schedule,
- Head-to-head competition,
- Comparative outcomes of common opponents (without incenting margin of victory), and,
- Other relevant factors such as unavailability of key players and coaches that may have affected a team’s performance during the season or likely will affect its postseason performance.
As Pollard notes, the committee is no longer using the protocol that they claim to be using, based on these latest rankings.
What does it mean for the Big 12?
The Big 12 was always likely to get only one team into the Playoff, but the Big 12 being likely to not get a bye, while Boise State might get one, is absurd, based on the most obvious data point to use when comparing the Big 12 Champion to the Mountain West Champion, and that’s Strength of Schedule.
In the meantime, Iowa State plays Arizona State on Saturday in Arlington. But there’s no doubt there are coaches and athletic directors around the country trying to figure out how to plan future football schedules based on this year’s inconsistencies from the College Football Playoff committee, which has been anything but stellar.
