One of the biggest talking point since the College Football Playoff rankings have been released, especially from Georgia football's standpoint, is that the CFP committee is not valuing strength of schedule as much as they should. This was seen in the latest CFP rankings as Georgia came in at No. 7 while Penn State and Miami (FL) came in at No. 4 and No. 6, respectively.
The reason these rankings specifically don't make a lot of sense is because Miami does not have a single ranked win this season, and Penn State only has one against the No. 23 team in this week's rankings. Georgia on the other hand has three, with all three opponents currently inside the top 12 of the committee's rankings.
So it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense how the committee decided to rank both teams ahead of Georgia, even with the fact that UGA has one more loss than both teams. Thankfully a media member asked the CFP committee for an explanation about these rankings, but unfortunately the response given was not very good.
"One of the things that we talk about is teams can only play the schedule they have in front of them against the teams that have been, from a conference standpoint, assigned," CFP chairman Warde Manuel shared. "We can maybe be critical of non-conference schedules and those kind of things, but when it gets to the conference, particularly as these conferences have expanded, there are more teams to play throughout the conference. Teams can only play the schedule that's in front of them. They can only play the opponents that they have."
The CFP committee has this all wrong
The CFP committee is right that teams should not be specifically punished because of who is on their schedule, especially in conference play when they have no say who their opponents are. But strength of schedule is still an extremely important data point that can't be ignored.
As an example, let's compare Miami's first win of their season to Georgias. As you all know, Kirby Smart and Georgia took down Clemson 34-3 while Miami beat Florida 41-17. Based off win margin, Georgia's win was slightly better, but these two games are essentially the same. So how should someone determine which win is better? You compare Clemson to Florida and see who the better team is.
When doing that, it is quite clear that Clemson is the far better team. The Gators are just 6-5 this season while Clemson is No. 12 in the committee's ranking and 9-2 overall. When adding this context, it should become abundantly clear which win is better. But that is not the case for the committee.
Based on these comments from the CFP committee, they likely will view these wins on the same level because the margin of victory is about the same and both wins came against a power four opponent. But going through the exercise we just did shows that Georgia's win is much stronger.
It's unfortunate that the committee doesn't care about strength of schedule, because for decades teams have been told that this is one of the most important metrics. But that has suddenly changed in the blink of an eye, and could have a terrible long term impact on college football as a whole.
On the bright side, Georgia gets to play Georgia Tech on Friday which is the one team who has beat Miami this season. So in theory, a win in this game should put Georgia ahead of Miami, but maybe that isn't a safe assumption based on how terrible the committee has been so far this season.