Strength of schedule for teams being considered for the College Football Playoff has been a highly talked about topic by media pundits across the country.
For the Playoff committee, it’s not as important as the rest of the country thinks it is.
“Strength of schedule is a component,” committee chair and Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel said. “It’s an important data point to us and for us. But it is not the only assessment that we make.”
As a whole, there are many aspects that Manuel and his committee look at and consider when ranking the Playoff teams and it’s far from an easy task.
“We have to rely on how the teams are playing and who they’re playing as well as how the other teams, regardless of strength of schedule, are playing their opponents,” Manuel said. “We take a look at it holistically.”
That holistic approach makes it difficult to evaluate even with strength of schedule as a component because conferences aren’t what they used to be and teams don’t always play each other.
“They’re playing different schedules. It’s not the fault of one team who doesn’t have a stronger schedule who they’re playing in their conference opponents,” Manuel said. “These conferences have increased in size, and so there are less match-ups where you are matching the top teams in the league each weekend. So it does make it difficult to assess the teams even with the strength of schedule.”
This alone throws a curveball in Todd McShay’s comments.
“In what world is Penn State and Indiana BETTER than Georgia, Ole Miss, Alabama, and Tennessee?… They’re just NOT.” – @McShay13 👀@ryenarussillo | #CollegeFootball pic.twitter.com/BlcVcQo04P
— FanDuel TV (@FanDuelTV) November 19, 2024
Looking at it on a week-by-week basis makes everything that much more subjective based on the eye test and data. Wins should matter and losses to.
Add Nittany Sports Now as a preferred source in Google! Click here to add us.Then, of course, there’s ESPN’s Booger McFarland who seemingly only looks at the scoreboard and not the stat sheet with this hot take about Penn State’s “struggles” against UCLA.
“In what world is Penn State and Indiana BETTER than Georgia, Ole Miss, Alabama, and Tennessee?… They’re just NOT.” – @McShay13 👀@ryenarussillo | #CollegeFootball pic.twitter.com/BlcVcQo04P
— FanDuel TV (@FanDuelTV) November 19, 2024
The subjectivity of it all also leads to these types of comments by Joey Galloway where he mentioned what he thought Indiana should do with their quarterback against Ohio State.
Joey Galloway suggests that Indiana should bench Kurtis Rourke on Saturday vs Ohio State pic.twitter.com/iHiE241k9S
— Unnecessary Roughness (@UnnecRoughness) November 20, 2024
While much will always be made with strength of schedule, there’s so much more to the evaluation of a team. It does in fact matter where teams play, who they play and when they play them. As Manuel knows, life is much different when a player like Florida State’s Jordan Travis is on the field versus when he isn’t.
What also matters is many of the non-conference games are scheduled well in advance of the current season which is something Manuel is familiar with.
“As an athletic director, I can just tell you we’re scheduling games out four, five, six years ahead of time, and some of the teams that you put on your schedule at the time you schedule them are not strong teams, some of them are, some of them get stronger, some of them don’t perform as well,” Manuel said. “It’s not as easy as saying we choose to look at a team and who they choose versus who’s in their conference schedule. We just look at them holistically and who they play and make our decisions at that point in time.”
Right now, the committee’s decision is to reward a Penn State with the No. 4 ranking for losing only one game on the season to the current No. 2 team in the country Ohio State. That much can’t be debated.
