What is the CFP committee thinking? A look at the criteria for the playoff rankings

So, what will they get wrong this week?

The newest ritual for football fans is waiting for the College Football Playoff's top-25 rankings to come out on Tuesday nights, then trying to see if it makes sense. The 13-person committee is 2 for 2 — two weeks , two rounds of rankings with as many questions as answers.

Even with the arrival of a playoff that retired the quaint tradition of coaches and sports writers determining titles, college football is still the king when it comes to concocting an opaque and remarkably subjective method of determining who gets to play for a national championship.

Yes, wins and losses count. But that's not all.

How a team looks, how hard its schedule is and whether its best players are available are part of the mysterious set of calculations the committee sifts through each week to eventually determine which 12 teams make the bracket (and next year it will be 24).

The CFP lists four criteria its committee considers each week:

Some of this is straightforward. Notre Dame's win Saturday over Boston College isn't going to carry as much weight with the committee as its win over Miami a week ago.

But every formula — the ones you can see on an ESPN analytics page and the one you can't that the CFP committee uses — is based on something subjective. Strength of schedule involves who a team played, not just whether it won.

Sure, it's easy to understand how a team deserves more love for playing 8-2 Alabama of the SEC than 8-2 Toledo of the MAC. But things get a little murkier when sizing up the schedule of a team that plays, say, 10-0 UCLA of the Big Ten vs. 9-1 Georgia of the SEC.

Thus far this season, this committee is favoring the SEC in virtually every calculation. Fun fact from last week's rankings: Every SEC team in the top 12 had a team directly behind it from a different conference with at least one fewer loss.

This is the perfect time to break down the infamous “pod system” the committee started using last year. Selection committee chairman Hunter Yurachek has said, more than once, that the head-to-head meetings only come into play if teams are in the same four-team pod.

This involves teams ranked 1-4, 5-8 and so on. It explains, for instance, why Notre Dame, at CFP No. 5, was two spots higher than Miami last week. They had just played. They were in the same pod. Easy enough.

But CFP No. 3 Alabama and CFP No. 8 Tennessee were not in the same pod, so while Tennessee's 26-10 win over the Crimson Tide last month surely bought it some brownie points, it wasn't enough to put the Vols ahead of the Tide even though the teams had identical 7-2 records (now 8-2).

Last year, when the initial rankings came out, Notre Dame was ranked 10th, eight spots ahead of the Miami team it lost to the first week of the season.

Neither team lost again and the gap between the two kept shrinking. Not until the final rankings came out, though, were they in the same pod. At that point, Miami moved ahead of Notre Dame and the Irish missed the playoff. That led to about a week's worth of recriminations and sore feelings.

The CFP's official language here: "Comparative outcomes of common opponents (without incenting margin of victory)."

This metric makes sense until you take a dive into the SEC. We'll take it on faith that the SEC's 10-2 record against opponents from the other Power Four conferences makes it superior in the committee's eyes. But it is a small sample size, and a few of those 10 wins have come against the likes of Georgia Tech, Florida State, Clemson and Kansas — none of them world-beaters this year.

Common opponents might just be another way of saying that strength of schedule is important and justifies conferences scheduling a ninth league game and more meetings among their Power Four brethren. It's also a reminder that, ultimately, strength of schedule is imperfect.

Also, the CFP notes that the committee doesn't give credit to teams that run up the score, like the good ol' days when a 73-0 win would certainly impress a poll voter or two. Still, the committee wouldn't have a pulse if it didn't take note of Wake Forest's 49-7 demolition of SMU on Saturday.

Again, the CFP's language: “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.”

The mind can run wild here.

Most remember the final version of the four-team playoff announced in 2023, which produced a truly unsatisfying outcome when unbeaten Florida State was left out because, essentially, its starting quarterback got hurt. Seemed simple to understand, but wait!

Last year, when Lane Kiffin departed Mississippi before the playoffs, Yurachek explained the committee was reluctant to weigh the chaos that created because it hadn't seen Ole Miss play without Kiffin on the sideline. This season, Yurachek suggested the committee had paid more attention to Ohio State's struggling defense than its reconfigured offense in its first game without injured quarterback Julian Sayin. Huh?

Yurachek also has, at times, spoken about teams’ offensive and defensive lines. He has spoken about teams' resilience after falling behind big and nearly coming all the way back in certain games.

There are so many more potential relevant factors that it's hard to even make a list.

Maybe the best piece of news: Only one team in the CFP top 12 — No. 11 Kentucky — lost this week, which should make for a fairly stable ranking Tuesday night. Key word: Should.

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