If the Powers That Be behind the College Football Playoff were to take my advice on how to fix their selection criteria, I'd tell them to make one simple change that would eliminate nearly all of their headaches: get rid of the Tuesday night ranking shows. We've got a full decade of data now showing they create a false precedent that changes season to season, week to week and even team to team and puts the committee in an impossible spot where the entire college football universe puts their rankings under a microscope. Just put out the rankings on Selection Sunday and be done with it, I'd say.
Alas, the CFP did not take my advice. The weekly rankings return on Tuesday, Nov. 4, the organization announced Wednesday.
The CFP is making one significant change, however:
Changes for the upcoming season include enhancements to the tools that the selection committee uses to assess schedule strength and how teams perform against their schedule. The current schedule strength metric has been adjusted to apply greater weight to games against strong opponents. An additional metric, record strength, has been added to the selection committee's analysis to go beyond a team's schedule strength to assess how a team performed against that schedule. This metric rewards teams defeating high-quality opponents while minimizing the penalty for losing to such a team. Conversely, these changes will provide minimal reward for defeating a lower-quality opponent while imposing a greater penalty for losing to such a team.
The change comes after a data analysis panel spent six months studying the CFP's criteria and selection process. Wednesday's announcement is typical of the CFP -- too transparent in some ways (we don't need to know your 23rd-ranked team in the first week of November) and too guarded in others. Who was on this panel? What data did they analyze to come to this decision? How, specifically, has the metric been tweaked?
We don't know any of that, but what we do know is that it comes in response to the committee choosing 11-1 Indiana and 11-2 SMU over 9-3 Alabama. Indiana was the CFP's 8th-ranked team (but seeded ninth, under a seeding criteria that has since been altered), SMU was No. 10 (seeded 11th), and Alabama was ranked No. 11 and the first team left out of the field.
How were those teams ranked in the CFP's strength of schedule metric last season, and how would they have ranked under the 2025 formula? Would any changes have been enough to toss out the Hoosiers and/or Mustangs and put in the Crimson Tide and perhaps even the 13th-ranked Miami Hurricanes, the 14th-ranked Ole Miss Rebels or even the 15th-ranked South Carolina Gamecocks? We don't know.
What we do know, however, is that ESPN has its own Strength of Record metric that attempts to do what the CFP is now doing. According to that metric, Indiana's 11-1 record was the eighth-strongest strength of record in the country; Alabama was 17th, SMU 18th. LSU, Illinois, Missouri, Ole Miss, and even Iowa State all ranked above the Tide and the Mustangs.
In SP+, which also attempts to summarize how a team performed against its schedule vs. how an average FBS team would be expected to perform against that schedule, Indiana's 11 wins came against teams that had a median ranking of 92, with a high of No. 34 Michigan. (I assigned a No. 135 ranking, one below the worst FBS team, to Western Illinois, which is exceedingly generous to a 4-8 FCS team. IU's real median was almost certainly lower.) SMU's 10 wins came against a median of No. 58 in SP+ (again, assigning a No. 135 ranking to Houston Christian, a 5-7 FCS team) with a high of No. 18 Louisville. Alabama's nine wins came against a median SP+ rank of 33; the Tide beat three teams (Georgia, South Carolina, LSU) better than any of the 21 teams Indiana and SMU defeated.
Alabama, of course, lost three games; its 24-3 stinker at SP+ No. 31 Oklahoma was easily the worst of the six defeats that the three teams in this comparison endured, and its 40-34 loss to No. 51 Vanderbilt was the second-worst. Indiana lost to No. 1 Ohio State; SMU lost by one score to No. 17 Clemson and No. 19 BYU.
The quality of Alabama's wins were not enough to wash away the stench of its OU and Vandy losses under the CFP's 2024 strength of schedule metric. Would that still be the same under 2025's new formula? We have no idea.
What we do know, though, is that the 2025 season is sure to give us a new set of unique outcomes to argue about.