It’s time to shut the whole thing down and start over. That’s the only lesson to take away from the first installment of the College Football Playoff selection committee poll and what a debacle it, and the entire process, has proven to be.
As with most seasons, the Associated Press Top 25 Poll has been a disaster, with no consistent ranking philosophy, certain conferences enjoying an unearned boost among voters based on Nick Saban’s coaching in the 2010s and an overreliance on preseason polls that mean nothing and are hopelessly inaccurate.
But this week’s College Football Playoff poll is so bad it made the Associated Press look competent. Or at least somewhere near competence. There’s just one problem: This poll is what actually matters. And it’s worse!
That’s just the start of the issues. The other is using school athletic directors, who are subject to their own biases, to be the public face of the committee. Then do televised interviews trying to explain their “thinking” and the resulting rankings, while repeatedly contradicting themselves, giving half-hearted illogical comparisons and talking about ludicrous, made-up “pods.”
But we’ll get back to that.
By now, many around the sport are familiar with the most egregious mistakes in this week’s poll.
The Alabama Crimson Tide have no case to be No. 5 in anything, let alone the College Football Playoff poll. UCLA is No. 8 despite being the only undefeated team in the Big Ten or SEC. Why on earth is Kentucky No. 6? Ohio State is No. 12, while the team they just lost to is No. 20. Indiana is No. 4 for some reason, and Texas has been given a complete free pass after two horrific losses, including to an awful, legitimately terrible, Oklahoma team. But it’s worse than that.
Seemingly what happened here is that the committee members sat down for a few hours, talked about their vacation homes and golf memberships, then threw some team names in a hat, tossed it in the air and ranked based on which piece of carpet they landed on. Although even that might have been preferable to this abomination.
What should have happened? Well, opinions vary, but a preferable outcome would be a transparent process with clearly communicated metrics and measurements. Instead, we have some vague references to a “strength of conference” number. Which has never actually been defined for anyone. Instead, what we got is Hunter Yurachek rambling nonsense about Alabama’s quality wins and quality losses.
“Yes, they had that loss to Tennessee. But Tennessee doesn’t have that same level of quality wins. Yes, they beat Alabama, but you have to go deeper,” he said while “explaining” the difference in ranking between the Tide and Volunteers.
Those quality wins? An unranked Mississippi State team, a South Carolina team with three losses and a wildly overrated Kentucky team. Therein lies the problem. The committee gives credit for “quality wins” based on their rankings. South Carolina is good, they say, because we ranked them. Kentucky is a top quality win, they say, because we ranked them No. 6. That’s circuitous “logic” and it undermines the entire credibility of the process. The committee seems to be saying Mississippi State would be good if not for injuries. But no other conference is afforded that same deference, assumption or apparent dismissal of the Bulldogs’ epic defensive collapse.
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Just look at how Mississippi State has played of late:
This is what the committee gives Alabama credit for. Does Kamario Taylor play defense too? Would he have stopped his team from allowing over 35 points per game? Or are they just making things up as they go?
Then there’s the committee’s treatment of Ole Miss and Ohio State.
Ole Miss gets credit for their wins over No. 14 LSU and No. 18 Missouri, but little punishment for losing to Texas and the laughably ranked three-loss Gators. Yet Ohio State has a win over No. 4 Indiana and No. 19 Iowa, and their two losses are to the same No. 7 Texas team and No. 20 USC. How does that justify one team at No. 10 and the other at No. 12? Well Yurachek had some brilliance to share there too.
According to his explanation, the Buckeyes didn’t look like the same team after Julian Sayin’s injury, and they gave up “explosive plays” to the Trojans in their 30-18 loss. There’s just one problem, the Rebels have been worse at giving up explosive plays than Ohio State.
As one post on X noted, OSU “allowed two 40+ yard plays in that game, its first two such plays allowed this season.”
Ole Miss has allowed 10 plays of 40+ yards this year. Their explosive play rate is also marginally higher than the Buckeyes’ this year. If that sounds like they’re just making it up as they go, it’s because they are.
But we also have some data to demonstrate how absurd, and absurdly slanted and biased these rankings are. Bill Connelly, creator of the SP+ analytics-driven ranking system, put together a chart using a blend of metrics prior to this week’s poll. He created a mix of an 80% resume blend, meaning strength of record and resume SP+, and 20% team quality, meaning predictive, forward-looking rankings.
For some context, here’s how those rankings, again, a more objective set, shook out:
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If at first glance it seems like one conference keeps consistently over-performing its computer metrics, that’s because there is one conference being consistently overrated by the selection committee: the SEC.
Alabama is too high. Kentucky is nine spots too high, the single biggest miss of any team. Texas is two spots too high. So is Ole Miss. Tennessee is three spots too high. Missouri is four spots too high. South Carolina is six spots too high. On average, the human voters overrated SEC teams by nearly three spots per team. That’s a massive difference. And it’s part and parcel of how these human systems always go.
The SEC campaigns, lobbies and makes demands based on its claim of being the toughest conference. Hapless voters believe it without evidence, and suddenly every win and loss becomes “quality” because the conference has 10 ranked teams, many of which are wildly overrated.
Credit to Greg Sankey, the propaganda worked. And it’s going to fundamentally change the college football season.
Even Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti is fed up with it, and his team was ranked No. 4, saying on Wednesday, “These people — and there’s a whole bunch of them — they march out of the tent, they’re given instructions on what to say and follow the company line. I don’t need to go any further.”
A commonly floated theory about the rankings is that the committee set them up this way so it could repeat last year’s mistakes without punishing teams for losing games. Alabama, you may remember, played a meaningless SEC Championship Game in December 2025. It could only help the Crimson Tide, not hurt them, because SEC. With so many overrated teams in that conference, the results apparently don’t matter much. But elsewhere? Hoo boy.
Notre Dame better not lose to Miami because the Fighting Irish are out if they do, even though Miami is the No. 1 team in the country. Losing only counts when a team doesn’t have the benefit of overrated SEC wins to carry it.
That’s the ultimate issue here. Rewarding strength of schedule is one thing. But at some point, results have to matter. If a team scheduled Alabama, Georgia, LSU, Ole Miss, Texas, Miami, Ohio State and Indiana, then lost every game, should they be in the top 10? What if they win two of those eight games, go undefeated against four easy teams, and finish 6-6. Is that a playoff team?
In the SEC, the answer is trending rapidly towards yes. Which is why the whole system needs to be scrapped and rethought out. This isn’t working.