🚨 The tension is palpable in Aggieland. Tonight’s release of the final College Football Playoff (CFP) committee rankings before Selection Sunday has Texas A&M fans bracing themselves for what they fear will be another catastrophic under-evaluation of their 11-1 team. The initial shock of the No. 3 ranking was itself a sign of trouble, a “flashing warning light” that the committee’s process might be fundamentally flawed. Now, as the dust settles and the Aggies face a new set of comparisons, that anxiety has only grown.
The core of the frustration lies in the committee’s seemingly indifferent approach to modern, accepted metrics for evaluating team quality. Despite promises to incorporate Strength of Record (SOR) measures—a more holistic way of assessing how impressive a team’s wins truly are—the committee appears to be following its own, highly criticized path. By all indications, they are ignoring both SOR and standard Strength of Schedule (SOS) metrics favored by analysts.
The Problem with Primitive SOS
This methodological blind spot is particularly concerning as the Aggies now find themselves in a new, competitive tier. Instead of being measured against top-ranked teams like Indiana and Ohio State, their primary competition is now Texas Tech, Oregon, Georgia, and Ole Miss. Given the committee’s past behavior, Aggie fans have little confidence they won’t get the short end of the stick yet again.
Every serious college football observer knows the simple truth: not all 11-1 records are created equal. That’s why ranking systems exist. However, the committee seems to be relying on a highly simplistic, almost primitive method of calculating strength of schedule. This method, which primarily looks at the opponent’s win-loss record and the win-loss record of those opponents, is a holdover from systems like the RPI used in basketball and baseball.
Football’s Fatal Flaw: The Sample Size Problem
While this opponent-centric calculation can work in sports like basketball and baseball, where teams play a vastly larger number of games and have extensive non-conference schedules, it is utterly foolish for college football.
* Limited Sample Size: Football teams only play three to four non-conference games, drastically reducing the dataset’s reliability.
* Inflated Conferences: The current oversized conference structures mean a larger portion of a team’s schedule is spent beating on weaker conference opponents, which artificially inflates their SOS through sheer volume of wins against subpar teams.
This system essentially rewards teams whose opponents have accumulated wins, regardless of the quality of those wins. It fails to adequately credit a team like Texas A&M for defeating truly dominant opponents because the formula is less reliable and more easily manipulated by scheduling quirks than modern analytical tools.
Aggie faithful are right to be worried. The CFP committee is tasked with selecting the four best teams, yet their reliance on an outdated, easily gamed SOS model suggests they are prioritizing a methodology that simply doesn’t work for the current landscape of college football. Tonight’s ranking reveal isn’t just about a number; it’s a referendum on the committee’s commitment to fairness and accurate evaluation. For A&M fans, the outlook is grim—it appears yet another “committee catastrophe” is looming.