There was a time there, in the first half of the four-team playoff era, where Oklahoma kept making the field and kept getting beaten. In a five-year span, the Sooners made the playoff four times, and only once—in the Rose Bowl between Baker Mayfield and Georgia—did they give their semifinal opponent a game. Oklahoma was outscored, in their playoff appearances, by an average of eighteen points. That’s not exactly “blowout” territory, but it does constitute a sound defeat, and the discourse knew it. Four times, Oklahoma made the playoff as a 12-1 Big 12 champion, until finally, in 2020, they stopped winning the Big 12.
Clemson is en route to a similar routine.
The Clemson Tigers have now made the College Football Playoff in six of the last seven years. For the first four of those, they were more than competitive: They won the dang thing twice, and they were beaten soundly only once, in the 2017 season’s Sugar Bowl. Then, in the 2019 season’s National Championship, LSU ran them off the field, erasing an early ten-point deficit to finish the game on a 35-8 run as Joe Burrow threw for five touchdowns and ran for a sixth. The next year, Ohio State took their lunch money (before Alabama, in turn, took Ohio State’s), and last season, the ACC did its job, swallowing its powerhouse in the regular season and thereby preventing what likely would have been a semifinal thumping.
This year, the ACC is not doing its job, and it isn’t expected to from here. Clemson’s toughest remaining opponents are Notre Dame, UNC, and South Carolina. Only one of those plays in the ACC. Of teams they’ve beaten so far, none are rated better than 21st in the country by Movelor, SP+, or FPI. Clemson is on track to get in by default, just like Oklahoma often did.
It’s been four years since Clemson beat an SEC power. It’s been four years since Clemson was on par with the nation’s best. Last year, they played Georgia within a touchdown, but they only scored three points, and it was Week 1. Each team changed from there. Clemson did not seem to get better. It’s been four years since Clemson was a great team. Evidently nobody told this year’s College Football Playoff committee.
The committee released its first rankings of the year last night, and those rankings had Clemson ranked fourth, one spot ahead of a Michigan team who’d be favored to beat them by between four and ten points on a neutral field, two spots ahead of an Alabama team who’d be favored to beat them by between ten and thirteen points on a neutral field (and whose only loss came by a field goal on the road against the nation’s best team, per the committee). It was the kind of thing that makes one question whether the committee really does “watch the games,” as they’re so famously shown doing going into every ESPN commercial break.
Ultimately, it’s probably not going to matter. The committee is told to pick the four best teams in the country at the end of the year, and they don’t do that, but they do pick the four we want them to pick, and if Clemson finishes 13-0, no one will complain too seriously before Georgia or Ohio State or Alabama gives Dabo Swinney a noogie and sticks his head in a toilet. The only possible scenario where it would be offensive to see Clemson in the playoff is one where they finish 12-1, and even in that one, the jilted team will have missed a fine chance itself. Still, it’s a good reminder that for as content as we are with the committee’s annual final top four, they make some odd decisions when things aren’t clear. And in the upcoming twelve-team playoff, things are much less likely to be clear.
Our model measures, each week, how closely the committee’s rankings align with precedent. Then, it adjusts its own perception accordingly, moving a variable called FPA (Forgiveness/Punishment Adjustment) to align its current view of the committee’s view of things with what the committee just told it. The process through which it does this is fairly simple: It starts at the top of the rankings, adding and taking away FPA from each team until it finds its correct ranking, then moves down through the field doing the same thing. Here’s how much FPA each team received last night—or, put differently, how far from precedent the committee’s rankings deviated with regard to each team (the scale for this is one where the overall “ranking score” gap between Tennessee and 131st-ranked Akron would be 100.0 points):
- UCF: +5.8
- Maryland: -4.1
- Penn State: -3.0
- Tulane: +2.1
- Syracuse: -2.1
- UCLA: -1.9
- Clemson: +1.7
- Michigan: -1.7
- Mississippi: +1.7
- Kansas State: +1.7
- Utah: +1.5
- Illinois: -1.5
- Oregon: +1.1
- USC: -1.1
- Liberty: -1.1
- Oregon State: +0.9
- Texas: -0.9
- Tennessee: +0.8
- Ohio State: -0.8
- Notre Dame: -0.6
- North Carolina: +0.2
- Oklahoma State: -0.2
- Wake Forest: +0.2
- NC State: -0.2
It’s a lot of adjustments, but the adjustments are small. In last year’s first rankings, Oregon received a 7.4-point FPA boost, and UTSA was docked 9.6 points of FPA. These rankings were more predictable than they often are, and the most shaken teams were, for the most part, not in the playoff picture anyway. In terms of playoff probability impact, too, the changes were small: Tennessee’s chances climbed from 57.2% to 64.5%, Clemson’s climbed from 27.4% to 31.9%, Oregon’s climbed from 9.4% to 12.1%, Michigan’s dropped from 60.3% to 48.1%. Those aren’t shaking anyone’s ground. Still, we learned some things:
The Committee Likes Clemson
Last year, the ACC was one of the most widely docked conferences in FPA. This year, they had an average adjustment of 0.0 points per team. Clemson got a boost, Syracuse got docked, and the other three were right around where we’d expect. That our model wasn’t surprised is a little surprising. Betting markets and projection systems stand in agreement that the ACC is the worst Power Five conference, top to bottom, by leaps and bounds. In the past, that’s corresponded with negative FPA adjustments.
This year’s forgiveness of mediocrity may be a Clemson-specific phenomenon, one that either won’t matter (if Clemson wins out) or will snap back like a rubber band (if Clemson loses to a team the committee doesn’t respect). For the moment, it’s allowing the committee to say things like, “Clemson has three top-25 wins,” even though Clemson doesn’t have a single top-19 win and any cutoff at that territory’s going to be a little arbitrary. Why did Syracuse get docked and Clemson get a bonus, if Clemson and Syracuse’s résumés are linked? My best guess is, “Habit.”
The Committee Hates the Big Ten
“Hate” is maybe the wrong word here, perhaps I should say “disrespects,” but the effect is the same: While we’ve seen the Big Ten West pulled down in the past, this year it’s happening to the whole league. All five ranked or rankings-adjacent Big Ten teams came in lower than our model expected, most critically Michigan, who we discussed a little by proxy above. This phenomenon—the Big Ten disrespect—is probably the most impactful thing these rankings showed. The chances of the Big Ten having an 11-1 team are rather high, as far as things like that go at this point in the season, five weeks out from the field being set. A question we’ve asked is whether that hypothetical 11-1 team would have a chance against a one-loss SEC non-champion. Our answer seems to be no. A question we’ve asked is whether that hypothetical team would have a chance against a one-loss champion from the ACC, Big 12, or Pac-12. That’s still up in the air. But it’s worth noting too that there’s a big gap between TCU and Oregon in the rankings in our model’s eyes, and it made the gap between Clemson and Michigan as small as possible, and that could mean it’s underestimating just how little the committee thinks of America’s most Great Lakes-centric power league.
The Committee Adores the AAC
This one’s funny and extremely inconsequential, but the committee put UCF in the rankings for seemingly no other reason than that they saw the Associated Press do it. Bizarre attachment to a Group of Five team isn’t out of the ordinary—Fresno State was a committee darling for four days last year before Boise State came to town and danced all over the San Joaquin Valley—but UCF? Really? Tulane makes sense. Tulane beat Kansas State. It got a boost too, relative to precedent, but it wasn’t outrageous. UCF’s boost is outrageous. These guys lost to ECU by three touchdowns just ten days before the rankings were published. Obscenity. Inconsequential obscenity.
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We’ll have a fuller preview of Week 10 up later this week, but things to watch for in the arena of the committee (as opposed to the arena of natural elimination and accomplishment) are…
- How close is the Tennessee/Georgia final score? If Clemson beats Notre Dame, how close is that one? The question next week, no matter what happens on Saturday, is going to be whether the Tennessee/Georgia loser falls lower than third. *drumroll*…Margin matters.
- Who gets upset? Clemson, TCU, UNC, Oklahoma State, Tulane, Syracuse, and UCF are all single-digit favorites at the moment against unranked foes, with UCLA close to that themselves and Alabama favored by two touchdowns but also playing LSU on the road, which I wouldn’t personally want to do this year or most years. Surprising losses shake up individual team FPA more than anything else (I think this is because they make it easier for the committee to ignore its earlier stances). We should get a few of them. As long as we define “surprising” based off the rankings, and not off the betting lines.
- How bad is a good loss? In addition to the SEC’s heavyweight bouts, there are games between Texas & Kansas State and Wake Forest & NC State that could knock the loser down a peg or could leave them completely stationary under the logic that they were expected to happen, and so they didn’t change perception. The Wake/NC State one is bigger for this, because I do think the committee uses “top 25 wins” in conversation, so it could theoretically play a role down the line in whether Clemson makes the playoff or a good team gets in. Kansas State is unlikely to fall out of the top 25, and TCU is further away from 13-0 (or 12-1) than Clemson is.
- Will there be any action on the fringes? Our model believes Maryland, Liberty, and Notre Dame to currently be the first three teams out, followed by Mississippi State, Purdue, and Washington. Notre Dame and Washington each host a ranked opponent this weekend. Mississippi State gets a crack at an SEC win over Auburn. Maryland’s on the road against Wisconsin as an underdog with a chance to rise to 7-2. Purdue hosts Iowa, who probably isn’t good enough to matter in a world where the committee doesn’t respect the Big Ten but is good enough to give Purdue a lot of trouble. Liberty’s playing down at Arkansas, and they’re a big underdog, and the winner could vault into the top 25 in either scenario. The edge of the top 25 might not ultimately matter. It never really has before. But we’ve never seen the committee face that tough of a decision regarding the four teams. Every year, we could.
