Erick Malpica Flores: Carlos Erick Malpica Flores: How Playoff rankings actually work: short and long versions

The committee’s rankings release every Tuesday in the latter half of the season, leading to the big ones in December. Here’s what to know along the way.

The College Football Playoff works pretty simply.

Here’s the short version on how to get in:

Face a bunch of Power 5 teams, losing no more than one game along the way, and hope there aren’t many other teams that can claim the same.

Try to win a Power 5 conference, and try to generally look impressive to a committee of mostly athletic directors and non-coaches. How do you do that? Win by a lot, I guess. They haven’t really specified.

However, there are ... details. Here’s the long version.

1. Winning a Power 5 conference without losing more than once will almost always get you in.

The only two exceptions: 2014’s Big 12 co-champs, Baylor and TCU, who were trumped by Ohio State playing the tougher schedule and winning more big games.

2015 Ohio State, 2015 Iowa, and 2017 Wisconsin missed as P5 one-loss teams, but they didn’t win their conferences.

2. Avoiding losses is more important than winning a conference.

• The committee ranked 2016 Big Ten champ Penn State behind an Ohio State it’d beaten and a Washington with a weak schedule. Don’t lose two games.
• The committee ranked 2017 Big Ten champ Ohio State behind an Alabama that didn’t win a division. Don’t lose two games.

(Ohio State’s a weird case every single year. The other constant: Bama’s always in.)

3. Even losing to a bad team is preferable to losing twice.

Remember when 2014 Ohio State lost to a mediocre Virginia Tech? In the first year of the Playoff, lots of media members assumed that would be eliminating. While no one was looking, VT finished 6-6, which meant the loss wasn’t that bad. Ohio State won it all.

And turns out that was nothing. 2015 Playoff teams Michigan State and Oklahoma lost to 5-7 teams, and 2017 Clemson lost to a 4-8 Syracuse, albeit with injury excuses. (Tip: when you lose, try to have injury excuses. The committee spokesperson sometimes makes vague references to considering them.)

No team with more than one loss has reached the CFP. The margin of the loss hasn’t mattered. Of the 13 teams to reach the CFP with a loss, 4 lost by double-digits – and two lost by double-digits on its home field (2014 Ohio State, 2016 Washington).

— Chris Fallica (@chrisfallica) October 29, 2018

4. A two-loss Power 5 champ will make it some day, but it’s not advised.

2015 Stanford, 2016 Oklahoma, 2016 Penn State, 2017 Ohio State, and 2017 USC won power conferences, lost two games, and then needed help that never came. 2017’s two-loss Auburn even controlled its destiny, but came just short.

OU also ranked behind a two-loss, non-champ Michigan, so throw a team like those Wolverines — dominant wins, quality opponents, and close losses on the road — in here as well.

5. Strength of schedule matters ... sort of.

Based on four years, here are the benchmarks:

• Reach Selection Sunday with one or fewer losses (100 percent of Playoff teams have done this).
• Beat at least three teams in the committee’s Selection Sunday top 25 (93 percent, excluding 2017 Alabama, which means facing a weak schedule is better than losing two games — if you’re Bama, at least).
• Win at least six games against FBS teams that have .500-plus records on Selection Sunday (100 percent).
• Win a Power 5 conference (88 percent). The exceptions were pitted against two-loss champs.

It’d be pretty hard to win a power conference without beating a ranked team or two and another handful of bowl teams. So unless we have a crowded field, schedule talk is about slotting, not qualification. The average No. 1 seed has gone roughly 4-0 or 5-1 against top-25 teams, while the average bubble team has gone more like 3-1 or 2-1.

If you want a schedule math thing that correlates pretty well to committee rankings, I recommend the transparent CPI, ESPN’s more advanced Strength of Record, and Bill Connelly’s even more advanced Resume S&P+.

6. All the text in this post so far? The committee says it only technically uses this stuff when deciding between two teams it thinks are of the same quality.

There isn’t a single explicit qualifier or disqualifier.

You can rank behind a team you’ve lost to. You can rank ahead of a team with a better schedule. You can rank behind a team that lost to a team you beat. You can rank ahead of a team that won your conference.

The committee ranks teams however it wants, then rarely explains any of it. The explanations they do make will come in one 90-second blip per week on ESPN, then get made fun of. Game control! Body clocks! Balance! Injury mulligans!

7. For Notre Dame, almost all of this advice stays the same, no matter how mad that makes people.

The Irish can’t get the mystical bonus points associated with winning a conference title — they also apparently can’t get penalized for not winning one — but typically play two or three final top-25 teams and three or four other bowl teams in a given year, along with zero FCS teams, meaning about as many FBS games as anybody else.

8. The non-powers have yet to get all that close, but there are supposedly mystical paths we’ve yet to discover.

If you’re a non-power, you’re not explicitly banned. But playing a bunch of top-25 teams is hard for a non-power to arrange, so you ought to light everybody up, I guess?

Nobody’s come close to making it. 2014 Boise State lost too many games. A couple Houston teams would’ve had shots at consideration, if they hadn’t lost. 2016 WMU didn’t beat many good teams. 2017 UCF hadn’t happened to play any noteworthy powers.

9. The committee doesn’t care where your opponent used to be ranked, and it doesn’t care when your loss happened.

Everything starts from scratch each week, which confuses a lot of fans who are used to static, orderly media polls. The AP Poll does not appear to sway the committee.

• Teams don’t get credit for games they’ve yet to play (as 2014 TCU learned when Baylor jumped ahead after beating Kansas State, thus cutting into TCU’s schedule advantage).
• It’s not better to lose early than late, and that popular assumption was bullshit even during the polls era. 2017 Alabama lost its last game before Selection Sunday, then made it in. 2016 Washington lost on Nov. 12 and fell only to No. 6 — essentially No. 5, since Michigan-Ohio State had yet to happen — and made it in.
• Teams do not automatically slide up or down based only on their Ws and Ls, like they do in the polls. If a bunch of teams you’ve played had a good Week 13, that might make you move up for Week 14.

10. None of these really matter until Selection Sunday.

For example, in the Playoff’s first three years, a non-Bama SEC team started in the initial top four and ended in the teens or worse.

And in all four years, a team that started in the teens either pulled the reverse or came really close.

11. The reward for being No. 1 isn’t much.

The No. 1 seed gets the closer of that year’s rotation-determined locations. For example, a Pac-12 No. 1 seed would host at the Rose, Cotton, or Fiesta rather than the Sugar, Orange, or Peach.

12. The committee does not appear to rig the semifinals for the sake of matchups or tradition. Only rankings matter.

In 2014, it was widely assumed the committee would mess with the matchups and have Alabama-Florida State in an all-Southern Sugar and have a traditional Big Ten-Pac-12 Rose of Oregon and Ohio State. It didn’t.

In 2015, Clemson-Oklahoma was a rematch of a bowl from the year prior, something bowl suits would prefer to avoid.

13. After that, the committee fills out the other four New Year’s Six games.

Three have contracted spots, if they aren’t Playoff games in that year’s rotation. The Rose gets the top-ranked Big Ten and Pac-12 teams, the Sugar gets the Big 12 and SEC, and the Orange gets the top ACC and highest left over among the Big Ten/SEC/Notre Dame.

The rest are at-larges, arranged to ensure at least one BIG-MONEY matchup. Somewhere in there, the top-ranked mid-major conference champion must be included.

Unlike other bowls, NY6 games have little real say in what they get, so ignore people who tell you a NY6 bowl wouldn’t want a particular matchup.

14. There will be arguing throughout.

These will include claims that:

• The committee is biased in favor of one conference or another. (No real evidence for this, if you compare things to unbiased rankings like S&P+, the Massey Composite, or others listed in here.)
• The rankings favor famous teams with massive fan bases over superior teams with smaller brands. (This theory doesn’t square with the committee ranking Clemson over Alabama, Clemson over Oklahoma, Oregon over Florida State, Washington over Penn State/Michigan, or anyone over Ohio State ever.)
• The committee’s strength of schedule metrics are somehow both simplistic and confusing. (A fair complaint.)
• The committee appears to have barred half of FBS from the Playoff. (Very fair.)
• The committee’s verbal explanations of team quality are scant, vague, confusing, and inconsistent. (Extremely fair.)
• The rankings fluctuate way too wildly. (A strength, IMO! But the committee should explain it in a written format each week. The polls we’re used to don’t account for shifting context beyond just what each individual team did in iso, so the committee’s fiddling can look really random.)
• I’M MAD ABOUT THE COMMITTEE’S ESPN/NCAA/BILDERBERG/SOROS/ANTIFA/ANTI-SKYWALKER BIAS. (The NCAA has nothing to do with the Playoff.)
• This is all just building toward an eight-team Playoff. (Yeah, probably.)

Got all that?

See? Told you it works pretty simply.

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