Let me run out a little scenario for you:
- Alabama goes 13-0.
- Georgia goes 11-2.
- The Pac-12 champion has two losses.
- A two-loss Iowa State or Texas knocks off Oklahoma in the Big 12 Championship.
- Cincinnati loses to Notre Dame.
- Notre Dame loses to at least two opponents.
None of these things is all that unbelievable. The unlikeliest of them might be Oklahoma losing the Big 12. It’s a rather believable season, and one that would leave Alabama and likely Clemson and Ohio State in their customary spots as the first three teams in the playoff, albeit with a lot of noise from Georgia about Clemson being a foregone conclusion. It would leave Georgia, potentially Oklahoma, potentially the Big Ten runner-up, and potentially the Big 12 and Pac-12 champions in the mix for the final slot, alongside potentially…Texas A&M.
As it stands right now, there are four SEC West teams in the AP Top 25, with a fifth—LSU—in the top thirty. Of those five, LSU’s loss to UCLA might not age particularly well. Mississippi is liable to lose as many as four or five games. Auburn has to host Georgia at one point, has a dangerous trip to Arkansas on the line, and has to visit a Penn State program that might be good enough to smoke them or might be bad enough to miss a bowl game or might be mediocre enough to do both. Will all this happen? I have no idea, but the point is that you can’t trust anyone in the SEC West right now behind Alabama and mayyyyybe A&M (yes, we rate A&M a five-y maybe). There’s a decent chance that the West finishes the year with only two teams in the College Football Playoff Rankings, and with A&M’s other Power Five opponents Colorado (in Boulder), Missouri (in Columbia), and South Carolina (in College Station), it’s possible the Aggies could finish the season with eleven wins, all against ultimately unranked foes.
They’d still be ranked highly, and if their non-Alabama opponents really did turn out to be this bad, they’d likely have run up the score on quite a few SEC teams, giving them kudos in the infamous eye test. Their game against Alabama takes place in early October, with plenty of time to build a narrative that somehow biology and physics have changed over a two-month spell and December A&M is a different beast from October A&M. And if Georgia does the Georgia thing and looks ugly at times, and doesn’t show up to play at times, and struggles to score points pretty much all the time…there are going to be people arguing for a team with no ranked wins to make the playoff over a team that beat Clemson on a neutral field. It would basically come down to whether wins or losses mattered more, especially if the initial Georgia loss was a bad one, like that South Carolina stumble a couple years back.
Will it happen? I don’t know. We haven’t seen this exact scenario unfold before, so it’s hard to find precedent. Of the other one-loss teams that didn’t win their conference but still made the playoff, two had only lost to their conference champion, one of those had three top-ten wins, and the other had just a top-ten loss alongside a pair of ranked wins. Of course, this is apples-to-oranges to an extent, because the competition for those last spots each year differed from what A&M’s would be in this scenario, but even in the weakest one-loss non-champion case—that of 2017 Alabama, the eventual “national champion”—the next teams in line either had two losses (Ohio State), hadn’t won their conference themselves (Wisconsin), or were UCF (who was actually ranked twelfth). The Georgia/A&M decision would revolve around a lot of things (apologies, we don’t have our model finished yet to explore these—still validating data from the last twenty years), but it’s not impossible for it to go A&M’s way.
This is, again, just one scenario. But its believability and the near-precedent of 2017 make it stick out. Even without resorting to outlining historic chaos, we could probably get a playoff team with no ranked wins, even with just a four-team playoff. I’m not sure exactly what that says. But it says something.
