The weekend’s big results in college football mostly speak for themselves: Oregon lost to Washington and UCLA lost to Arizona, so the Pac-12 has just one one-loss team, and it isn’t its best. TCU beat Texas, so the Horned Frogs are yet again probably better than we thought and yet again one step closer to crashing the playoff party. There was another big result, though, one that could make the real ultimate decision on who goes to the playoff and who doesn’t. It wasn’t seismic, and it wasn’t sudden. It verged on the expected. But Tennessee thrashing Mizzou, pulling away down the stretch, might end up being a big, big deal.
Tennessee vs. The ACC
We’ve been talking lately about Clemson’s sleeper playoff chance. The Tigers have a direct angle at a 12-1 record and a Power Five title, things that almost always earn teams playoff berths. Their lone loss was a beatdown, but it came on the road against a ranked opponent who has a good chance to stay ranked from here, one which might even draw close to the top ten when all is said and done. Clemson’s a conventional playoff case, and Tennessee’s is not. If Clemson makes the playoff, we’ll be told the committee really values conference titles. If Tennessee makes the playoff, we’ll be told the committee was following its instruction to choose the best teams. The former is more customary than the latter.
This isn’t to say this is going to come down to Tennessee vs. Clemson. Michigan is decently likely to have a Tennessee-adjacent résumé of its own, and the scenario where TCU is both 12-1 and the Big 12 champion is loudly in the picture. If USC wins out, they have a customary chance themselves, though USC winning out is unlikely and could conceivably not be enough. LSU could upset Georgia—though the odds of that are roughly one-in-eight. North Carolina could upset Clemson. Clemson or Tennessee could lose to South Carolina.
There is a lot of football to be played—which is part of why headlines saying things like “The Only Eight Teams Who Can Make the College Football Playoff” are incorrect—but, Tennessee is under threat. Tennessee is, presently, ranked outside the top four, and that isn’t likely to change this week, and while our model says Tennessee is three-in-four likely to make the field, there’s no guarantee TCU will lose and there’s no guarantee Tennessee won’t get chosen above a probable 11-1 Michigan or Ohio State and the committee really does like Power Five championships, making threats out of USC, TCU (in a non-undefeated iteratio of possibilities), Clemson, and even UNC. Tennessee’s argument, again, is that it’s one of the four best teams. It isn’t that it’s built a spectacular résumé. That’s an argument for teams who win their conferences. Tennessee’s argument is that it’s the best team. Blowing out Mizzou is necessary to make that argument. Which is part of why, in our model—which views Tennessee’s adjusted scoring margin (APD, or adjusted point differential, is our model’s proxy for things like rating systems and the eye test in the mind of the committee) as the third-most-impressive in college football—boosted the Vols from 58.6% playoff-likely to 75.1% on the heels of the win. Some of that, yes, was Oregon losing. But TCU’s win took a lot away. Most of Tennessee’s improvement came from Tennessee.
Up Goes TCU
The Horned Frogs are now 10th in Movelor, 16th in FPI, and 6th in SP+. That’s a wide range at that point in the bell curve, but the questions for TCU are whether they’re good and whether they’d get in at 12-1 (with variants of the latter where they win or lose the Big 12 Championship).
It may seem silly to ask whether the team which is 10-0 and just held Texas’s offense to three points in Austin is good. It is a little silly. But “good” is a selective threshold, and if you put that threshold at “Could this team believably hang with Alabama?” the answer for TCU is a page full of question marks. SP+ thinks they probably could. FPI would have the line at thirteen. Movelor is between. Alabama, most likely, is not a playoff team (while Tennessee wanted blowouts, Alabama needed them, and Saturday’s performance was not a blowout, even if beating Mississippi in Oxford is cause for pride). But, they’re pretty darn good. The teams who are probably better than them—Georgia and Ohio State—are almost locked into the playoff. The teams who are probably about as good as them—Michigan and Tennessee—are knocking on the door. TCU? We really don’t know. We still really don’t know. And while this doesn’t hold the most weight in the arena of whether or not the committee chooses them, it does have a lot of impact on whether they’re in the conversation. Here’s what we’re really asking, then: Is TCU good enough to do this three more times?
The other question regarding the Horned Frogs is whether they can get into the playoff at 12-1. Importantly, there are two distinct ways they could finish 12-1 in the first place.
The first path to 12-1 is the more conventional playoff path, and it’s the one where they lose one of these last two conference games (at Baylor, home against Iowa State) and then win the Big 12. One-loss Power Five champions usually make the playoff, one-loss Power Five not-champions usually don’t, that’s extremely simplistic but the committee really might kind of think that way. The problem for TCU is that a loss at Baylor or a home loss against Iowa State would look pretty bad. Baylor could conceivably crack the ultimate top 25—if they beat TCU and beat Texas, I’m guessing they’re ranked at 8-4—but Iowa State cannot. Iowa State needs to beat TCU just to make a bowl. They certainly can—the spread on that game is currently looking like about a 13-point mark, which isn’t insurmountable—but the overall message is this: A 12-1 Big 12 champion TCU is pretty unlikely to have a better loss than a 12-1 ACC champion Clemson.
The second path to 12-1 would leave TCU with a better loss, but it wouldn’t come with a conference title. The second path is to take care of business in Waco and against the Cyclones and to then lose to Kansas State. In that boat as well, TCU’s probably not making the playoff. They might get an Orange Bowl invite, rather than being relegated to the Cotton Bowl, but TCU probably does need to go 13-0. They need to keep avoiding rolling that seven. Unless a lot of help comes their way.
Down Goes Oregon
Speaking of a lot of help: Oregon is one of the teams that could still make the playoff that people are saying can’t make the playoff, and their path is sneakily simple: Win the Pac-12, hope Michigan or Tennessee gets upset, hope TCU takes one on the chin, run up the score to make the better-team case over Clemson. It’s a highly improbable path—our model, despite being wholly overwhelmed by the Pac-12’s tiebreaker scenarios (the Pac-12 isn’t helping with this, their multi-team tiebreaker rules are unclear), puts the probability at about 1-in-100—but it’s a path. The same path exists for Utah, and has existed for Utah for a long time. A similar path exists for LSU. We’ve never seen a two-loss team make the College Football Playoff, but we’ve also never seen what the committee does when it has to go looking. People saying “Oregon can’t make the College Football Playoff” sound a lot like those who last year said “a Group of Five team can’t make the College Football Playoff.” Of course Oregon can. Of course a Group of Five team could. They just need a lot of help.
The loss, though, is thoroughly disastrous. The Ducks had a tightrope to walk, but a visit from Washington was not supposed to be the biggest gust of wind. Maybe that’s what did them in. Maybe they were too focused on Utah, who comes to town this weekend.
UCLA, meanwhile, was facing an uphill climb—a tossup against USC followed by a tune-up against Cal followed by an underdog drill in the Pac-12 Championship—but they are now actually done, unlike Oregon. Their loss was too bad to get to even a 1-in-1,000 playoff chance. 0.0%, UCLA. You can’t lose to Arizona at home.
With that, the Pac-12 is probably dead. Although…
USC fans are probably reading this with a “what the f***” reaction, and that reaction is entirely fair. USC is 9-1, lost on the road by one point to a good team (not as many questions about Utah being good as there are about TCU, though inconsistency plagues each), and did exactly what was asked of them this week. Let us say this, then: If USC goes 12-1, they’ve got a hell of a case. It’s hard to see a world where USC is kept out at 12-1 with that their loss and those their wins. The Pac-12 is pretty good this year! It’s no Big Ten or SEC, but a team winning twelve games while playing in that league and playing Notre Dame in nonconference play is a conventional playoff team, and the committee could play the Michigan-and-Tennessee-are-better-teams card, but the committee oftentimes in the end does the thing that won’t get them yelled at. They won’t get yelled at if they put 12-1 USC in the field. Not by the people they listen to, anyway.
The problem for USC is that all three of these upcoming games—if they get three, which seems fairly likely but isn’t guaranteed—are tossups. Their trip to Pasadena to play UCLA is a tossup. Their visit from Notre Dame is close to a tossup. The Pac-12 Championship will be a tossup if they’re not a decent underdog against Oregon or Utah (the line for that would probably be about a field goal if the game happened today, but Oregon or Utah blowing out the other would change that). Like TCU, USC has a lot of dice left to roll. And while we don’t know if TCU has any margin for error, we’re pretty darn convinced USC does not.
The Clemson in the Room
Clemson beat a near-ranked team this weekend, and they beat them solidly. It was the most impressive performance of Clemson’s all year. If Louisville beats NC State and Kentucky, it might even be a ranked win in the end, potentially giving Clemson four of those (UNC, Florida State, Louisville, and potentially Wake Forest, who has its own solid path to 8-4). I don’t think ranked wins should be a big deal, and I don’t think ranked wins are actually that big a deal, but I do think the committee likes to point to them, and that’s part of why Clemson’s conditional playoff probability (the chance it makes the playoff if it wins out) is somewhere around one-in-six. That’s not that high—our model does think the committee will say the loss was too ugly—but it’s also not all that low.
Meanwhile, North Carolina is also in the room, and also only lost to Notre Dame, with their latest escape coming from Wake Forest. The thing about UNC is that they can’t even match Clemson’s team sheet. Sure, they could beat Clemson, but the maximum number of ranked wins they could end up with is only three, and that’s a big stretch that relies upon NC State pummeling Louisville this weekend and Wake Forest climbing back in. They also, importantly, have terrible margins. Forget one-score wins. Five of UNC’s victories have come by just a field goal (or less). The chance is there—the committee does historically love itself some one-win Power Five champs—but it’s a bad chance.
What to make of this? Well, if Clemson does go 12-1 and doesn’t make the playoff, it’s likely going to be a loud acknowledgement from the committee that while the ACC is a “power conference,” it isn’t as powerful as the others. This would be the first instance of this kind of conference-wide rebuke, and it would be entirely deserved. The league, once solid last decade, has fallen on terrible times. It is a bad, bad league by the standards I’d imagine it applies to itself.
Group of Five Talk
UCF holds the keys to mid-majordom’s Cotton Bowl spot, having beaten Tulane, but it still needs to either beat (probably) Tulane or Cincinnati again in the AAC Championship, which isn’t a guarantee. If UCF loses that game, the bid will probably go to whoever beats them, but in funky scenarios (say SMU wins the league, or say UCF loses another regular season game), we could see Troy sneak on in. Our model thinks the committee should effectively have them ranked 26th right now. They’re not terribly far out of the picture.
Rankings, Bowl Projections-ish
Here’s what our model expects to see from the committee tomorrow night, along with where it thinks they lie on a hypothetical scorecard where 0.0 is the bottom of the FBS and 100.0 is the top of the FBS:
1. Georgia (100.0)
2. Ohio State (97.5)
3. Michigan (93.0)
4. TCU (92.3)
5. Tennessee (91.3)
6. LSU (83.4)
7. Alabama (83.0)
8. USC (82.9)
9. Clemson (82.3)
10. Utah (79.4)
11. Penn State (79.0)
12. UNC (77.8)
13. Oregon (77.4)
14. Mississippi (73.9)
15. Kansas State (71.8)
16. UCF (69.9)
17. Florida State (69.2)
18. Washington (68.6)
19. Texas (68.2)
20. Notre Dame (68.0)
21. UCLA (67.7)
22. Oregon State (66.1)
23. Oklahoma State (64.4)
24. Tulane (63.5)
25. Louisville (62.7)
I personally don’t think the committee will jump Bama over USC—that’s mostly a product of our model’s caution in assigning too much FPA, which therefore had Bama only the smallest amount behind USC to start the week. It might be a bad feature. It’s on our research list.
I also personally don’t think Louisville will climb into the rankings with a loss—it’s entirely reasonable, given what teams around them did, but it would probably break some committee brains. More likely, we get NC State undeservedly hanging on, or the committee goes and finds an SEC team for that last spot. Florida fits the bill. This is a fine approach, but it can lead to weird rankings down the line, when the committee puts itself in a corner with a given team, and this doesn’t matter this year, but the twelve-team playoff is coming, everybody, and 25 is a lot closer to 12 than it is to 4.
As far as the bowls go, here’s where the New Year’s Six seems to be headed, based on my estimations. Median projection:
Peach Bowl: Georgia vs. Michigan
Fiesta Bowl: Ohio State vs. Tennessee
Sugar Bowl: TCU vs. Alabama
Rose Bowl: Penn State vs. Oregon
Orange Bowl: LSU vs. Clemson
Cotton Bowl: USC vs. UCF
This is a weird median, because TCU going 12-1 but losing to Kansas State is a lot likelier than TCU going 12-1 and still winning the Big 12, and because everyone in the Pac-12 is likelier than not to lose at least one more time. But, TCU’s likelier to win the Big 12 than Kansas State, and anyway all that switching to the other TCU scenario would do would be bump TCU to a hometown Cotton Bowl and put Kansas State in the Sugar Bowl. In this estimation. Which, I don’t know, it does seem fairly likely given we’re three whole weeks out. Good luck finding a Pac-12 median. We might be headed towards a five-way tie over there. Gigantic weekend in that league, even if Oregon and UCLA turned off the playoff thermostat.
