We noted last week that the committee has not been wholly consistent in how far down teams move after suffering a loss, though we can begin to note a pattern this week.
Six ranked teams lost last week. Once again, some of them fell further than others. In general, it feels like the amount a team drops for a loss is based on how badly it is beaten. We have already seen Florida State not drop for a close loss to Clemson. This week, we saw Memphis not lose a single spot when it lost by one point to a ranked Houston team. We got the very strong impression last season that the committee cares a lot more about whom you’ve beaten than whom you’ve lost to. The committee has done absolutely nothing to disabuse us of that notion so far this year.
Of course, that makes sense and is fair. A close loss to a ranked team, especially one ranked above the losing team, is probably a good indicator that the losing team was ranked more or less correctly in the first place. Of course, this does not give the committee a real chance to punish teams for not quite having a resume that is up to par.
For example, let us look at Baylor. The Bears were living off the committee’s eye test until now. The resume and schedule had absolutely nothing to show for themselves. Baylor was highly-ranked on the assumption that it could back up its blowouts of lesser competition when facing better competition. Baylor had that opportunity and couldn’t do it.
The loss to Oklahoma was a relatively close one, which meant that the committee didn’t drop the Bears much. On the other hand, the entire basis for Baylor’s ranking fell apart with that game. It is very hard, based purely off on-field results and strength of schedule, to justify Baylor being nine spots ahead of Houston. Yet, unless the committee was willing to drop Baylor a ton (which it clearly was not), that was the position it forced itself into with Baylor’s high ranking (and Houston’s low one) last week.
Similarly, Florida State did not drop at all after its close loss to No. 1 Clemson. Now, as teams ahead of the Seminoles lose, they are slowly sliding back up the rankings. The committee backed itself into a corner by not dropping Florida State, even though its resume deserved it. There is nothing on Florida State’s resume that should put the Noles ahead of many of the teams behind them. Five of FSU’s eight wins are over teams in the bottom third of the FBS, and not a single one is in the top 40. The Seminoles have not beaten a single team with more than six wins. Florida State should be much lower than it is, but unless the committee wants to risk confusing and enraging the public with a precipitous and seemingly-unexplainable drop, there is nothing it can do.
Of course, in contrast to Baylor, Mississippi State — following its blowout loss to Alabama — fell out of the rankings from its previous position at No. 17. It makes sense, though. Mississippi State did not have too much of a resume to speak of coming into the game; one of its other losses (LSU) just got a lot worse, and the committee had no compulsion not to drop the Bulldogs because of how lopsided the game was. The Bulldogs’ resume is still more deserving than Wisconsin’s (the Badgers have yet to beat a top-40 team, as we pointed out last week), but the committee has always shown that it doesn’t pay as much attention to the very bottom of the rankings as it probably should.
There is a glaring precedent-setting decision in the middle of the rankings that has to be mentioned. Right now Michigan is sitting at No. 12 in the rankings and Utah is at No. 13. If you recall, Utah beat Michigan to open the season this year. Last year, the committee ignored head-to-head when comparing Baylor and TCU–until the very end of the season when the resumes were close. TCU was several spots ahead of Baylor until then. However, to end the year, Baylor jumped TCU due to its head-to-head victory, even though TCU’s SOS was better.
The issue in question? Utah has a much better SOS than Michigan and has more ranked wins (two to one). The only real explanation for the difference in their rankings is some measure of subjective eye test, which is a shocking and disappointing precedent. The committee is basically telling us that not only can an “eye test” or a similarly subjective measurement can trump the overall resume, it can even trump actual results on the field. Because the teams were ranked one spot apart and because of how the committee ranks teams, that means the committee directly compared Michigan and Utah and made a conscious decision to rank the Wolverines ahead. In a way, it’s mind-boggling, whatever the excuse is. Again, I’m far from the biggest advocate of head-to-head being overused. In fact, I am quite an opponent of utilizing head-to-head when the losing team has an objectively stronger resume. However, that isn’t what happened here.
Not much else is particularly noteworthy this week. Many of the teams who lost didn’t drop as far as some might have expected, but when you look at the resumes it does make sense. There was a pretty big gap last week between the resumes of the top 14 teams and the 11 teams behind them. Even though Stanford, LSU, and Utah suffered losses (and Utah’s was pretty ugly), there just wasn’t a great distance to drop, because no one currently behind them has a resume that is worthy of jumping them. This does show, as we have seen evidenced before, that the committee is actually looking at resumes each week and not just sliding teams down after bad losses. The resume seems to matter less when looking at a “good loss,” but when push comes to shove, the committee will eventually correct errors caused by that too (for example, when it jumped Mississippi State over Michigan State in last season’s final rankings).
The last point we need to discuss here concerns the trio of North Carolina, Navy, and Houston. North Carolina and Navy beat relatively weak teams this past week while others around them fell or were idle. Houston beat Memphis, which is still ranked due to that win against Ole Miss. All three made significant strides. However, Houston remains behind Navy and UNC, even with the quality win. I understand Navy being ahead of the other two; the Midshipmen have the much better loss and better wins right now. However, the degree to which those two jumped–and the fact that they could not leap LSU–tells us a lot about how the committee views the resumes of these three teams.
The fact that North Carolina remains ahead of Houston shows us something we learned last year–namely, that the committee does not have much respect for Group of 5 teams, even when they have similar resumes to a Power 5 counterpart. However, Navy’s ranking might give us an inkling into what a G-5 team can do to earn respect. We will need to see more cases to be sure, but the most obvious potential reason for Navy’s high ranking is that one of its non-conference games was against a legitimate P-5 (Notre Dame in this case) contender. That would also explain why Memphis is still ranked after two consecutive losses. If a G-5 team wants to be treated like a P-5 team, it must play top P-5 teams whenever it can. Then again, maybe I’m reading too much into this. Maybe the explanation is, as mentioned above, that the committee just pays less attention the lower down it gets in the rankings.
