Blatant Homerism: The College Football Playoff and non-conference scheduling
It was supposed to be the moment when the Texas Longhorns taught the college football world a lesson.
After the preseason No. 1 team in the country saw its hopes of a bid to the College Football Playoff snuffed out, everything was going to be on the table regarding its future schedules. If the CFP’s selection committee didn’t want to give it credit for losing a game at Ohio State, why schedule those kinds of games in the first place? Better to load up on the cupcakes than to risk a loss in your non-conference schedule.
That was the party line from Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian and friendly members of the local media leading up to the announcement of the latest round of rankings on Tuesday. So games against the Buckeyes and Michigan Wolverines in 2026 and 2027 were on the chopping block, right?
No. Sark confirmed on Wednesday that the Longhorns would, in fact, “honor” their contracts with Ohio State and Michigan and allow the Big Ten powers to play them in Austin. (Presumably, the visitors’ legions of fans will be permitted to come, too, and their money will still be accepted around town.) Sark noted “it’s the right thing to do,” seeing as UT already went to Columbus and Ann Arbor, but he made a point that future commitments might be in jeopardy.
Notre Dame, which has a home-and-home series with the Horns on the calendar for 2028 and 2029, must be terrified.
To be fair, the decision to add a ninth game to every team’s conference schedule already had many of Texas’ SEC mates clearing the decks in their future non-conference slates. For example, the Oklahoma Sooners will complete a two-game series by traveling to Michigan next year, but their marquee non-conference matchups in ‘27 and ‘28 currently involve road games versus SMU and Houston. Similarly, the LSU Tigers won’t face many heavy hitters from outside the SEC after Clemson visits Baton Rouge in ‘26.
Adding that ninth game against another conference opponent every year understandably makes choosing to play a strong team from outside the league less palatable to SEC programs. Meanwhile, getting the number of conference games in line with the Big Ten arguably likely makes the typical schedule for an SEC team difficult enough for purposes of the CFP selection process. And bear in mind that the field for the FBS postseason tournament will assuredly expand in the near future.
So the slow decline in major inter-league matchups going forward does feel somewhat inevitable.
None of that has anything to do with Texas’ current predicament.
The argument that losing to Ohio State bumped Texas out of the CFP this season is based on the reality that the release of the CFP rankings during the season is a weekly exercise in projection. Pundits, fans and even the people put in charge of explaining the results to the public pick and choose the data points as they see fit to either justify or attack the selection committee’s decisions. Margin of victory, head-to-head results, conference championships – you could make any case you want for any team, depending on how you arrange and emphasize the information to support your conclusion.
None of these post hoc rationalizations really tell us much about how the selection committee behaves, either from week to week or over the course of time. In fact, though, the group’s behavior is highly predictable. Stats wonks Dave Bartoo and Adam McClintock of Matrix Analytical Solutions have even developed a model that can project the committee’s rankings with a high degree of accuracy using fewer than 10 metrics. (Bartoo and McClintock release their projections behind a paywall every week prior to ESPN revealing the rankings, and McClintock tweets out a comparison of their model’s projections against the actual rankings every week in the aftermath of the announcement.)
Based on what their model shows, UT needed the Ohio State game on its resume this season just to get within striking distance of being in the field. Swapping the Longhorns’ loss to Ohio State for a gimme win would severely hurt their score in the model’s input for strength of schedule. Consequently, whatever bump they received from removing a loss and gaining a win in their record would have been negated by the hit to the quality of their schedule. UT would have essentially traded one anchor on its ranking for another.
If you believe the results of the selection committee’s deliberations illustrate the need to change the process for evaluating teams, you probably have a point. But considering how the committee has done business for more than a decade now, the suggestion UT got unfairly punished in the rankings for losing a game to an excellent team is specious.
With all this talk about rankings, here’s my prediction for the CFP seedings:
1. Ohio State
2. Georgia
3. Indiana
4. Texas Tech
5. Oregon
6. Ole Miss
7. Texas A&M
8. Oklahoma
9. Notre Dame
10. Alabama
11. Virginia
12. North Texas
Not much drama.