CFP Committee Is Giving SEC Teams Too Much Credit for Losses

You’ll hear fans from down south claim, “It matters more in the SEC.”

That might be true in terms of how passionate their fans are, but I’m not sure that applies to wins and losses. Wins matter more, but losses are starting to look far less important.

Every SEC team with a winning record is inside the first installment of the CFP Top 25, including two teams with three losses. Oregon is the only other team inside the top 25 with three losses.

At this point in the season, any team with three losses should be on the outside looking in. There’s too much differentiation between schedules within a single conference that it’s far too early to start adding these three-loss teams back into the rankings.

Obviously, big wins should matter more than bad losses, but at some point the losses have to matter. The most egregious example is where they ranked Alabama. They have one of the better singular wins on their resume over Kentucky, but they also have two losses.

One, they’re eight spots above a Tennessee team that already got crushed by and three places above a UCLA team that hasn’t even lost this year. Heck, they’re also above two-loss Ohio State and Texas, both of which have substantially better wins than Alabama.

UCLA doesn’t have the most impressive wins on its resume, but it has one fewer ranked win than Bama and, more importantly, two fewer losses. Some years the schedule breaks in your favor, and that’s happening for UCLA. Nobody is arguing for Miami to be ranked lower even though they have the same number of ranked wins as UCLA.

The committee puts way too much importance on brand names, but their biggest brand is the SEC. Beating anyone in the SEC is seen as a good win. Alabama is currently ranked fifth because the committee counted a win over Mississippi State as a good win. Kamario Taylor was playing through an injury in that matchup, and even then, Mississippi State has a horrific defense that the rest of the conference has exploited.

On the flip side, if you lose, it’s not because you weren’t good enough; it’s just the SEC grind, and you might not even fall a single spot. The committee has it set up so Alabama, Texas, and Ole Miss can all pick up a third loss and still make the playoffs.

Texas missed the playoffs last year with three losses, and the CFP committee is making sure they never make that mistake again with big-name SEC programs.