The College Football Playoff field has been announced, and as it has for the past 25 years, the Eliteness system can still explain why certain teams are ranked ahead of others. But for the first time, Eliteness also runs into a problem. Before getting to that, let’s look at what the system got right.
Eliteness says that when comparing two teams with the same record, the Elite Program will get in over the non-elite program. This year’s selections reinforce that pattern across multiple tiers of the playoff field.
- At No. 1 sits the lone 13–0 team in college football, Indiana. No controversy there.
- At No. 2 is Ohio State, an Elite Program and the highest-ranked team with a 12–1 record.
At No. 3 is another Elite, Georgia, also 12–1.
At No. 4 is Texas Tech, a Non-Elite with a 12–1 mark.
Two Elites ahead of a Non-Elite with the same record. Eliteness holds.
- At No. 5, Elite Program Oregon is the highest-ranked team at 11–1. They appear ahead of 11–1 Non-Elites Ole Miss and Texas A&M.
The Elite ranked above the Non-Elites. Eliteness holds again.
- At No. 8, Elite Program Oklahoma is the top-ranked 10–2 team. They sit ahead of fellow 10–2 Non-Elite Miami at No. 10.
Again, Eliteness holds.
- At No. 9 is Alabama, an Elite Program and the only 3-loss team in the playoff field. They earn a spot ahead of multiple better-record Non-Elites: 11–2 BYU, 10–2 Vanderbilt, and 10–2 Utah.
Even with three losses, Eliteness holds once more.
So far, everything aligns with a quarter-century of precedent: when the record is the same, Elites rise and Non-Elites fall.
But this year, for the first time, a new situation has the definition of Eliteness needing an addendum, and that’s where things get interesting.
The issue is straightforward. Notre Dame, an Elite Program at 10–2, was left out of the playoff, while Miami, a Non-Elite Program at 10–2, made the field. On its face, this violates the core Eliteness premise.
Yet, the explanation is both simple and fully consistent with the spirit of Eliteness. The nation watched Miami beat Notre Dame head-to-head in Week 1. The committee chose to defer to what happened between the lines this season. It’s kind of surprising that this is the first time this situation has happened, but it is.
The closest scenario to this occurred back in 2000. That season, Washington beat Miami, Miami beat Florida State, and all three finished with one loss. The obvious choice, Non-Elite Washington, was passed over in favor of the Elite Program, Florida State, who advanced to the BCS National Championship Game to face undefeated Oklahoma. In that case, Eliteness overrode the head-to-head results within a three-team loop.
This year, however, there was no third team to give the committee an escape hatch. The comparison between the two teams was clean, but not without controversy. Just one week prior, the committee had Notre Dame ranked ahead of Miami, signaling an initial preference to ignore the head-to-head result. This implies that, even with both teams were idle, something happened to trigger the final week reversal.
CFP Committee chairman Hunter Yurachek explained the shift:
“We felt like, the way BYU performed in their championship game, a second loss to Texas Tech in a similar fashion, was worthy of Miami moving ahead of them in the rankings. Once we moved Miami ahead of BYU, we had that side-by-side comparison with Notre Dame. The one metric we had to fall back on was the head-to-head. We charged the committee members to go back and watch that Miami–Notre Dame game.”
With that, Miami moved ahead of Notre Dame and as a result, we now have an important addendum to Eliteness:
When comparing two teams with the same record, the Elite Program will get in over the Non-Elite program unless the Non-Elite Program has defeated the Elite Program in that same season.
I should mention that there may also be additional forces at play. Had Miami been excluded, the ACC would have been shut out of the CFP entirely. That would have cost the conference at least $4 million in CFP revenue and delivered a significant blow to its national relevance. The committee is not supposed to consider such factors, of course, but in the interest of fairness in a sport that has become more and more about spreading the wealth, it should be mentioned as a possibility.
In the end, the 2025 playoff field reinforces much of what Eliteness has taught us for more than a quarter century. The system still explains nearly every major decision the committee made, yet Miami’s selection over Notre Dame demonstrates that head-to-head results can, at times, matter more. This does not dismantle Eliteness. It simply provides new evidence that sharpens its definition. And like the sport itself, Eliteness will continue to evolve.
