Hypothetical football was the SEC’s friend a year ago, though not an especially helpful one: Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina surely would have thumped the cutesy Indiana Hoosiers at any point on any field in 2024, but one loss to the only formidable team on a soft IU schedule was enough to make the College Football Playoff field over those three-loss survivors of bona fide gauntlets.
(And then SMU stayed ahead of those three after losing the ACC title game to Clemson, and an offseason full of SEC whining — the league sets the college football standard for that as well — was assured.)
Hypothetical football favors the Big Ten now. It favors Big Ten power Indiana. The unbeaten Hoosiers and unbeaten Ohio State Buckeyes have looked like the best two teams in college football this season, consistently dominant on both sides of the ball and led by precise, Heisman-hunting quarterbacks. Both are metrics darlings. Put Indiana and the SEC’s top team at the moment, Texas A&M, on a neutral field and I’ll take the Hoosiers by a touchdown (AI doesn’t love IU quite as much but would favor the Hoosiers by three or four points, because I know you were wondering).
Indiana is playing like a dominant team and has arguably the best win of the season to its name, at Oregon. Yet the one thing the 2025 edition of the College Football Playoff selection committee absolutely had to do with its initial rankings? Rank Texas A&M over Indiana.
And it failed.
Welcome to complaining season!
You can gripe about no Group of 5 teams in the top 25, no respect for the ACC or the excessive eight-spot gap between No. 10 Notre Dame and No. 18 Miami — Miami beat Notre Dame, giving Miami a better win than Notre Dame possesses — if you like. I’m going to make like Greg Sankey and wonder aloud why all this talk of increased emphasis on schedule strength did not produce tangible results right away.
Ohio State at No. 1 is fine. The season-opening win over Texas (No. 11 in the initial rankings) is gaining value, and overpowering wins at No. 23 Washington and Illinois matter. That resonates a bit more than the unbeaten Aggies’ win at Notre Dame and underwhelming-to-date SEC results — it’s not the fault of Mike Elko’s team that a blowout win at LSU evokes a shrug at this point, but that’s how things have gone. Wins over Auburn and Arkansas (two teams that, like LSU, have fired their coaches this season) by a combined nine points does not convey dominance.
But we care more about strength of schedule now, right? The CFP put out a news release in August declaring that the “current schedule strength metric has been adjusted to apply greater weight to games against strong opponents.”
We, of course, don’t have access to the committee’s numbers. They will always reserve the right to throw a dash of “just because” into the stew. But The Athletic’s Austin Mock ranks Texas A&M No. 1 in “strength of record,” compared with No. 3 for Indiana and No. 6 for Ohio State. He has the Aggies’ schedule strength at No. 14, with Indiana at 45 and Ohio State at 64. ESPN also has the Aggies at No. 1 in its “strength of record” metric, followed by Indiana and then Ohio State. ESPN ranks the schedule strengths 15, 39 and 33, in that order.
To me, that adds up to a stronger case for Texas A&M to rank No. 1 than to rank No. 3. If two separate formulas measuring “strength of record” both conclude the Aggies are No. 1, how likely is it that the CFP’s new “record strength” had a different answer? Mack Rhoades, CFP selection committee chair and Baylor athletic director, said the “record strength” uses a “cumulative, sum of scores as we progress through the year.”
Also, Rhoades said, the preexisting schedule strength metric puts “more weight on stronger teams” this year. Indiana has road wins over No. 9 Oregon and No. 20 Iowa, the one team that really pushed the Hoosiers. But how good is Oregon? That double-overtime thriller at Penn State made much more of a statement at the end of September than it does in the first week of November.
The primary takeaway from Rhoades is that, for all this talk about caring more about schedule strength, he said “not any one metric is weighted heavier than the other.”
And he talked a lot about watching film.
“We refer to it as art and science,” Rhoades said. “The art is watching the team on film, the tape, how good they are, how physical they are up front. Offensive line play, defensive line play, how good they are up the middle. The quarterback play, skill players …”
And on and on. When hairs must be split, employ the JBM (Just Because Metric). This may upset Sankey and the folks in the SEC right away. But they’ll be fine. They made too much of a stink over how things happened to turn out last year, and they’re going to get five teams — maybe six teams — in this year. Even if “record strength” is a hollow term, better used to argue the merits of “Exile on Main St.” vs. “Sticky Fingers.”
Here’s the biggest reason I wanted Texas A&M to rank ahead of Indiana: Because the Aggies, like the Buckeyes, challenged themselves with a big-time nonleague game and won it, while Indiana destroyed Old Dominion, Kennesaw State and Indiana State. I asked Rhoades if that came up at all.
“The schedule is the schedule,” he said. “We don’t talk about scheduling philosophy.”
As a public service, can you start? Think of Septembers sapped of great games because national contenders aren’t dinged for scheduling like programs that still need to get creative and find six wins. Think of the committee members, forced to watch all that unsightly film.
