I don’t think it does. If Army beats Notre Dame and wins out, they should be in the playoff. The selection committee will have slated the top 12 final before that game.
BREAKING NEW CFP Rankings and projected matchups - 2024 Week 13
- Thread starter BamaNation
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Before I saw this post, I was thinking about posting something specifically about SoS and how it makes things exponentially harder. One observation I was going to make, which this chart makes it easy to see is that not one team with a top 30 SoS (according to Sagarin) has 1 loss or less.
Not one single team, and if you look at the other top SoS teams other than Alabama and Georgia it's a rather interesting listing.
Next (in order of Sagarin rankings) would be South Carolina and Florida, then LSU and Oklahoma. It begs the question or what exactly the difference between those four teams and Indiana, Boise State, Notre Dame and SMU are other than schedule?
what is going on with our espn ranking vs the others? Why the huge discrepancy? tennessee's as well
A couple of more points in response:
1) EVERY team has games like Mercer.
Why does it only matter when it's Alabama?
And what is this Big 10 apologist argument about "in November", as if Penn State didn't play 0-11 Kent State, Oregon didn't play FCS Idaho, and Indiana didn't play Western Illinois and Charlotte?
2) I'm old enough to remember when Oklahoma remained #1 after getting blown out and TCU remained #3 after losing the B12 title game....both, coincidentally, to Kansas State.
I think one problem with the increased playoff is that the ASSUMPTION is "this will make sure a so-called deserving team will get in no matter what" when the part they always overlook is "if you expand the number of teams, you expand the number of people who can plausibly argue they are DESERVING teams."
If Indiana reached and won the B1G title game last year - EVEN WITH THEIR CURRENT SCHEDULE - they would be in and nobody would complain. But what's going on now is they're building the hedge of "if Indiana wins all the other games but loses to the only decent team they play, they STILL belong in the playoff," which is insane...but can happen when 12 teams make it.
One last comment: this B1G fixation on November is funny. SEC teams tend to have one "who cares" game in November IN PART because the schedule is set for television and the SEC has more games on people want to see nationally than any other conference. Thus, they play some more meaningful games in SEPTEMBER than a number of the B1G clods do.
Recent history SEC in September:
Florida vs Tennessee
Alabama vs Ole Miss
Georgia vs SCAR
Auburn vs LSU (played in Sept 17 times 1992-2023, scheduled another but delayed due to 9/11, and played the first weekend in October four other times)
Alabama and then ATM vs Arkansas
I don't have an issue with the B1G playing cupcakes, either.
But I'm not the one whining about "Penn State played Kent State, they should be playing TEAM X!"
How can Tennessee only have 1 win over a bowl eligible team and just be 1 ranking behind us in SOS???
Because it's SOS, not strength of RECORD (SOR).
Bowl eligible just means a team has won 6 games - and we've played 12 weeks, meaning a bowl eligible team could have as many as 6 losses already.
Not knocking us, it's not our fault, but who - beyond UGA and Tennessee - have we "really" played this year? And we lost one of those.
LSU - losses to USC and Florida, both mediocre teams, and a coach on the hot seat
Wisconsin - an attempt to schedule aggressively, but they're bad this year, too
Mizzou - I mean, they're 7-3, but have you looked at whom they've beaten? NOBODY!! They've played 3 ranked opponents and lost by 31, 34, and at the end to SCAR.
I understand the games accumulate, and I understand rivalry, etc. I also understand it isn't our fault (we got handed what looked like a brutal schedule from the SEC office for Year 1), and I also understand Indiana would likely have at least 4-5 losses against our schedule while we would be unbeaten against theirs.
But Tennessee is right there with us on SoS largely because:
- they played us and UGA
- Florida is playing better and now at .500 (them beating LSU lowered ours and lifted theirs)
- remember also that their SoS will go down if we beat Oklahoma and Vandy is a wildcard since they could conceivably beat both LSU and Tennessee
If I'm not mistaken,our s.o.s.is 5th and UT is 41st? So we have played better teams,only Georgia has a better s.o.s than us in the SEC, it's the 3rd toughest
He was responding to the memes crimsonaudio put up showing the Vols at 17 and us at 16 on SoS.
Doesn't common sense tell us all that if we are right next to each other on one SoS and not even close on the other, AT LEAST ONE SYSTEM for SoS HAS to be wrong? Both might be - but one for sure.
USCe is a good win, no one really wants to play them right now.
Better now than it was, yes.
I was referring to the notion that PRIOR to the season, we looked to be facing a monster that - due to no fault of our own - is not quite what it seemed. At the same time, it's still better than what most teams face, too.
Pundits need to decide if schedule matters or not BEFORE they open their mouths.
You can't say "Indiana can only play who's on their schedule and they're unbeaten" and ALSO say, "Alabama should be ashamed to play Mercer."
I was listening to College Football Nerrds' breakdown of the CFP top 12 this week. Something that they brought up, and this will most likely play out if things go as expected, is that the teams hosting first round games will probably all be the Big10 at-large teams. This will be by virtue of the fact that they will most likely all be one loss teams or perhaps two loss Ohio St and the SEC will all be at least two loss teams. Therefore, you could very well have the 1st round hosts being Ohio St, Penn St, Indiana and probably ND. Their point was that it was an extremely unfair advantage that it will work out that way due to the Big 10 being so top heavy compared to the grind of the SEC. What they did not specifically state, but maybe they didn't feel like they needed to, is that all these games are northern site games played in December. That is a pretty big advantage, and most of those games will probably be against SEC teams.
Let's just go right in and dismantle this mythical nonsense then. I'm tired of it. Those idiots keep moving the goalposts, if you'll pardon the pun, and here we go again. "The SEC is afraid of road games up north in November," as if there's a bunch of B1G teams with open weekends in November! Now that we have a playoff, there's this "wouldn't it be fun to see the SEC have to play outdoors in December up north?"
1) There ain't no Big Ten teams that play outdoors up north in December, EITHER!!!
The B1G title game is INDOORS, so excluding the Covid year (when...a bunch of games got cancelled)....how many games do these teams play outdoors in December? Certainly not enough to give them an advantage.
2) What did every Southern football fan in their youth do on those rare occasions we got a snow dump?
I'll tell you what we did - we went outside and played with the football because it tended to hurt less when you hit the ground. Snow football was FUN. Now, I know it's not 'exactly' the same but this canard must die a painful death right alongside using the word "natty" and any mouth breather who says "throw out the records for the Iron Bowl."
3) Some Buckeye on Twitter yesterday was doing the "it's snowing" mockery of the SEC.
I mean, do you really think we've never seen snow? There have been days when the temperature and climate at an SEC game was worse than at a B1G game. These idiots think being worn down by the heat is the same thing as "baby, it's cold outside."
4) They're confusing the weather from right after New Year's to Spring Break with November and December.
I lived in Illinois for the (then) worst winter in history, the Blizzard of 79. Ice hit the ground on Friday, December 8, and we didn't go outside again for recess until April. But you still had days when even though you had snow packs, it warmed up to reasonable. It wasn't like we were stuck next to Lake Superior in Dulth in February.
5) They don't look very closely at their bases using the NFL to "prove" the point.
Remember when the NFL telecasts would mention that Tampa had never won a game where the temperature was below 40 degrees? Unmentioned was Tampa wasn't winning very many games in warm weather, either.
- the Dallas-Green Bay Ice Bowl? Half of the Packers' players were from the South...including a QB from Alabama (Bart Starr)
- the Freezer Bowl (1982 Cincy vs San Diego) - uh, the Bengals KILLED the Chargers, 40-17, in San Diego in November 1981 so what advantage is being alleged for the cold?
- the Bears mocked the 49ers as to how cold it was going to be prior to the 1988 NFC title game....won by the 49ers, 28-3; I hear Mississippi' Jerry Rice (5 catches, 133 yards, 2 TDs) had an off day that day.
- Green Bay's first home loss in the playoffs was to the Atlanta Falcons with a QB from Virginia
- the 2007 NFC title game in Lambeau won by the Giants....the Giants QB was from Ole Miss.....
If Ohio State hosted Ole Miss and beat them in the Horseshoe in December, it wouldn't be because "it's up north in December," it would be because Ohio State is the better team. Snow doesn't miraculously translate an average team into the Second Coming of the 1970s Steelers.
Those odds have already been run by FanDuel and the SEC team is still favored in every matchup.
I completely agree. Indiana being undefeated (with an easy schedule) trumps more than it should, at least in the playoff ranking so far. 11-1 Indiana in the 12 team field is indeed insane.
Yes, because the oddsmakers think that Alabama, UGA, Ole Miss, and Tennessee are better teams than Indiana, Penn St and Notre Dame, but the bigger issue to me is that those teams are probably going to be artificially rated higher than the SEC teams because they only have one loss against inferior competition as a whole. Getting to host a home playoff game is an advantage. I also understand that a meaningful college football game has never been played up north in late December, but it is an advantage, albeit a slight one, to the home team.Those odds have already been run by FanDuel and the SEC team is still favored in every matchup.
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