Last week was extremely eventful. We got the release of the first CFP Committee Standings. Then, two of the teams in the top 4, Alabama and Penn State, went down on Saturday. So where are we now?
Well, the purpose of the Eliteness Tracker is to show what the CFP Committee doesn’t know that they already know. It uses a pecking order based on the consistent logic of college football selection processes since 1936. Therefore, its predictive purposes are based on history and use the missing component in any discussion about who might be selected in the top 4. That component is what I call Eliteness.
Since there are only 3 undefeated Elite Programs left in college football, history shows us that no other team can challenge their position in the pecking order. If those three teams (LSU, Ohio State, and Clemson) win out, they are in. There may be a lot of reasons given for that justification publicly, and frankly, these justifications change from year to year. Some of them you have already heard like eye test, strength of schedule, best wins, or margin of victory. Later, you will have “conference champion” and my personal favorite, “playing well over the last month” added to the list.
The only consistency of logic is that, from year to year, the reasoning is never consistently applied. If you dig deeper, you find that what is consistently applied is that previous year’s results matter. Is Clemson’s schedule weak this year? Yes. Is it fair that they are ranked ahead of Minnesota who is undefeated and just beat Penn State? Not if you’re only using this year’s results. However, we saw Clemson blow out Alabama just 10 months ago. We saw Clemson blow out Notre Dame the week before. We saw Clemson blow out Ohio State the last time they played them. We saw them blow out Oklahoma the last two times they played them. Is it fair to compare Minnesota to that? Our gut would say no, it is not. Minnesota might be the better team, but if you had to bet your house on who would win a matchup with Clemson in late December, our gut would force us to bet on the known commodity, Clemson. That is Eliteness.
There’s another human factor in this as well. People, like the ones on the CFP Committee, will typically choose to “avoid being wrong” rather than be right. We saw this manifested with Penn State being ranked ahead of Clemson last week. I don’t believe that would have happened without their game against Ohio State looming. The loser of Ohio State vs. Penn State was going to drop below an undefeated Clemson, no matter who that team was. Likewise, an undefeated winner of that game was going to be ranked ahead. That’s what they were telling us and most people seemed to figure that out.
Week 12 Schedule
Rankings below reflect the Eliteness Tracker.
Indiana @ #10 Penn State, 12:00, ABC
Navy @ Notre Dame, 2:30, NBC
Wake Forest @ #3 Clemson, 3:30, ABC
#6 Georgia @ #12 Auburn, 3:30, CBS
#4 Minnesota @ Iowa, 4:00, FOX
#8 Oklahoma @ #5 Baylor, 7:30, ABC
UCLA @ #16 Utah, 8:00, FOX
I decided to add 1-loss teams ranked in the top 15 at this point. There is one, Utah.
