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David Hale, ESPN Staff Writer
The committee has released its second crack at the top 25, and it’s (almost) all Big Ten at the top.
That might seem a bit strange to the conference that boasts the most playoff-caliber teams and the most nonconference wins against other Power 4 leagues, and also has Paul Finebaum there to remind everyone just how angry they should be at this affront to good judgment.
With that, we’ll handle much of Finebaum’s homework for him. Here’s this week’s Anger Index.
1. The SEC
Eleven weeks into the 2024 season, and one thing seems abundantly clear: The SEC is the best conference in college football. Take a look at Bill Connelly’s SP+ rankings, for example, where nine of the top 17 teams are from the SEC. Or use ESPN’s FPI metric, where the SEC has spots 1, 2, 4, 5 and 9. Consider the team currently ninth in the SEC standings, South Carolina, has three wins over SP+ top-40 teams and losses to the committee’s No. 10 and 22 teams by a combined total of five points.
Yes, the SEC’s dominance and depth seem obvious.
So, of course, four of the top five teams in the committee’s rankings this week are from the SEC.
Wait, no, sorry about that. We’re getting late word here that, in fact, it’s the Big Ten with teams No. 1, 2, 4 and 5 in this week’s rankings.
It’s not that those four Big Ten teams aren’t any good. Oregon (No. 1) has chewed up and spit out nearly all comers this season. Ohio State (No. 2) is the best squad the gross domestic product of Estonia can buy. Penn State (No. 4), well, the Nittany Lions still haven’t beaten Ohio State, but we assume the rest of the résumé is OK. Indiana (No. 5) is blowing the doors off people.
But that’s it. The rest of the Big Ten is a mess. You need a magnifying glass to find Michigan‘s QB production. Iowa finally learned how to score and somehow has gotten worse. Minnesota looked like the next-best team in the conference, and the Gophers have losses to North Carolina and Rutgers.
A lack of depth does not inherently mean the teams at the top are not elite. Indeed, the other teams in any conference remain independent variables when addressing the ceiling for any one team. If the Kansas City Chiefs joined the Sun Belt, Patrick Mahomes would still be a magician and Andy Reid would still be saying “Bundle-a-rooskie-doo” in your nightmares.
But the cold, hard facts are these: Indiana’s best win came last week against Michigan (No. 40 in SP+) by 3. Penn State’s best win (by SP+) came by 3 against a below-.500 USC team that just benched its QB. Ohio State is absolutely elite on paper, but on the field, the Buckeyes’ success is entirely buoyed by a 20-13 win at Penn State, a team we also know very little about.
The SEC gets flack for boasting of its greatness routinely, and to be sure, that narrative has often bolstered less-than-elite teams. But this year, every reasonable metric suggests the SEC’s production actually matches its ego, and when Ole Miss (No. 11), Georgia (No. 12), Alabama (No. 10) and Texas A&M (No. 15) — all with two losses — are dogged as a result of playing in a league where every other team warrants a spot in the top 25, it undermines the entire point of having a committee that can use its judgment rather than simply look at the standings.
Let’s compare two teams with blind résumés.
Team A: 8-1 record, No. 14 in ESPN’s strength of record. Best win came vs. SP+ No. 20, loss came to a top-10 team by 3. Has four wins vs. Power 4 teams with a winning record, by an average of 14 points.
Team B: 8-1 record, No. 11 in ESPN’s strength of record. Best win came vs. SP+ No. 28, loss came to a top-15 team by 15. Has one win vs. a Power 4 team with a winning record, by 3.
So, which team has the better résumé?
This shouldn’t take too long to figure out. Team A looks better by almost every metric, right?
Well, Team A is SMU, who checks in at No. 14 in this week’s ranking.
Team B, though? That’d be the Mustangs’ old friends from the Southwest Conference, the Texas Longhorns. Texas checks in at No. 3.
Perhaps you’ve watched enough of both Texas and SMU to think the eye test favors the Longhorns. That’s fair. But should the eye test account for 11 spots in the rankings? At some point, the results have to matter more.
Or, perhaps it’s the brand that matters to the committee. If that same résumé belonged to a school that hadn’t just bought its way into the Power 4 this year, it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t be in the top 10 with ease.
Let’s dig into three different teams still hoping for a playoff bid, even if the odds are against them at this point.
Team A: 7-2, 1 win over SP+ top 40. No. 28 in ESPN’s strength of record. Losses by a combined 18 points.
Team B: 7-2, 1 win over SP+ top 40. No. 25 in ESPN’s strength of record. Losses by a combined 13 points.
Team C: 7-2, no wins over SP+ top 40. No. 24 in ESPN’s strength of record. Losses by a combined 21 points.
You could split hairs here, but the bottom line is none has a particularly compelling résumé, and they’re all pretty similar.
So, who are they?
Team B is Iowa State, which plummeted from the rankings after losing two straight. But the committee isn’t supposed to care when you lost your games. Losing in September is not better than losing in November. At least that’s what they say.
Team A is Arizona State. Its 10-point loss to Cincinnati came without starting QB Sam Leavitt and was due, at least in part, to a kicking game so traumatic head coach Kenny Dillingham held an open tryout afterward. The Sun Devils and Cyclones are two of three two-loss Power 4 teams unranked this week (alongside Pitt), but unlike Iowa State and Pitt, Arizona State isn’t coming off back-to-back losses. The Sun Devils’ absence seems entirely correlated to the fact that no one believed this team would be any good entering the season, and so few people have looked closely enough to change their minds that the committee feels comfortable ignoring them.
The team the committee can’t ignore, however, is Team C. That would be Colorado. Coach Prime has convinced the world the Buffaloes are for real, even if nothing on their résumé — a No. 77 strength of schedule, worse than 7-2 Western Kentucky‘s — suggests that’s anything close to a certainty.
The Big 12 remains wide open, but it’s to the committee’s detriment that it has so eagerly dismissed two of the better teams just because they’re not as fun to talk about.
Has Missouri played with fire this year? You betcha. Just last week, the Tigers were on the verge of falling to Oklahoma before the Sooners’ woeful QB situation reared its ugly head again and the game ended in a 30-23 Tigers win.
But here’s the thing about playing with fire: So long as you don’t turn your living room into an inferno, it’s actually pretty impressive.
Missouri is 7-2 with wins against SP+ Nos. 26 and 28, and its only losses are to the committee’s No. 10 and No. 15 teams. SP+ has Missouri at No. 17, though we can chalk that up to Connelly’s hometown bias. But No. 23? After a top-10 season in 2023, don’t the Tigers deserve a little benefit of the doubt? They currently trail three three-loss teams (Louisville, South Carolina and LSU) and are behind Boise State, Colorado, Washington State and Clemson, who, combined, have exactly one win over SP+ top-40 teams.
There’s a good chance that, should Brady Cook not return to the lineup, Missouri will get waxed at South Carolina on Saturday, and then the argument is moot. But the committee isn’t supposed to look ahead and take guesses at what it believes might happen (Florida State’s snub last year notwithstanding). It’s supposed to judge based on what’s on the books so far, and putting Missouri this far down the rankings seems more than a tad harsh.
The committee threw a nice bone to the non-Power 4 schools this week, with four teams ranked, including No. 25 Tulane Green Wave. That seems deserved, given Tulane’s recent run. But what is it, exactly, that puts the Green Wave ahead of UNLV?
UNLV has the No. 31 strength of record. Tulane is No. 32.
UNLV has the No. 98 strength of schedule played. Tulane is No. 96.
Tulane has a one-possession loss to a top-20 team. UNLV has a one-possession loss to a top-20 team.
The key difference between the two is UNLV has wins against two Power 4 opponents — Houston and Kansas. Houston, by the way, just knocked off Kansas State, a team that beat Tulane.
So perhaps the committee should spread a bit more love outside the Power 4.
Also Angry: Pittsburgh Panthers (7-2, unranked), Duke Blue Devils (7-3, unranked), Georgia Bulldogs (7-2, No. 12), Utah Utes AD Mark Harlan (the Utes would be ranked if Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark hadn’t rigged the system!) and UConn Huskies (7-3, unranked and thus prohibiting us from Jim Mora Jr. giving a “You wanna talk about playoffs?!?” rant).
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