A broken clock is right twice a day, but even that might be too much to ask for when it comes to the College Football Playoff weekly rankings show.
It can’t be said enough times how much of a bad idea the weekly rankings show is for the CFP process. Not only has the committee itself proven time and again that the weekly rankings don’t matter and everything can change for the final week. That has been true since the beginning of the playoffs. But it also continually exposes loopholes in their own logic, so nothing can possibly make sense.
The results are a convoluted routine in which every fan knows these rankings don’t matter, and they are only served up to us every week so ESPN has an hour of programming and hours of debatable content to fill its schedule. All it leads to is more toxicity, confusion, and tribalism in college football.
And true to form, it’s only getting worse.
On Tuesday night, it was the turn of Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek to step into the spotlight and take questions from Rece Davis. He is serving as chair because Baylor athletic director Mack Rhoades took a sudden leave of absence.
It only took one question for Yurachek to provide college football fans with more incredible CFP committee debate fodder when talking about the rankings of Miami and Notre Dame. Even though Miami beat Notre Dame earlier this season and the teams have the same overall record, Yurachek said that the committee won’t use head-to-head as a criterion until they are in a “comparable tier.”
Moreover, Yurachek said that Notre Dame was rated so much higher than Miami because it had better losses than the Canes. Of course, one of those Notre Dame losses was against Miami, which Yurachek says they can’t use to compare the two teams even though it’s being used in a totally illogical and arbitrary method to compare the two teams. Literally any other criteria that Yurachek could have cited – the number of Starbucks in South Bend versus Coral Gables, average amounts of rainfall in the month of October, who would win a steel cage match between Jimmy Johnson and Lou Holtz – would have been better than that one.
To make it even more absurd (if that’s possible), the CFP chair then stated that head-to-head was used as a factor in comparing Oklahoma and Alabama, with the Sooners ranked 8th and the Tide ranked 10th. However, it was apparently not used when comparing the teams ranked 9th and 13th.
What are we doing?!?!
How does anyone at ESPN, the College Football Playoff, the committee, or any of the powers that be in college athletics think that this is helpful?
In case you were wondering, the CFP committee at least has some transparency surrounding their rankings protocol and these mythological tiers. But it is still incredibly vague, and it’s clearly not something that can be fully explained in a two-minute interview on national television.
Incredibly, the fun continued when the ESPN cameras stopped rolling. During a conference call with reporters, Yurachek again appeared to apply a separate double standard to committee criteria. In talking about the Oregon Ducks, he mentioned the strength of their victory at Penn State, even though the Nittany Lions have fallen so far that they fired their coach.
They had a really big win at Iowa two weeks ago. Iowa was ranked in our top 25 previously. They won at Penn State. I know Penn State is not the same Penn State we expected them to be this year. Still it’s a very challenging place to play, as evidenced by Indiana having to have a last-second touchdown to win there a couple weeks ago.
In the same call, he mentioned that Virginia was unable to move up in the rankings because a team they beat, Louisville, had suffered a defeat that hurt their overall resume. Once again, the exact opposite logic is being used in both scenarios.
Why is Virginia still at No. 19? Did Louisville’s loss and that being one of Virginia’s better wins hurt UVA?
Yurachek: I think you just said it right there. Virginia had an impressive win against a Duke team that’s at the top half of the ACC. Duke is now 5-5, and then Louisville with another loss fell out of our rankings. That was a significant win at the time for Virginia.
So you look at Virginia’s resume, they are 9-2. Their schedule strength lagged behind some of the teams that are in front of them. Then the losses to NC State, and even Wake Forest at 7-3, I think impact where Virginia’s currently ranked.
It’s been clearly stated for years that the weekly rankings show is a net negative for the sport. It is entirely unnecessary. To ask someone like Hunter Yurachek, who has a day job as a full-time athletic director at an SEC program, to be the voice of authority on the College Football Playoff rankings is totally unrealistic. It’s no wonder we get this confusion and dissatisfaction week after week when the whole enterprise is set up to fail.
ESPN can easily fill the same programming block by posting mock rankings from its own analysts. They do it with NFL mock drafts every year. What’s the difference? The network can make the same arguments and have the same debates without hearing a word from the CFP until early December. That way, the committee’s work isn’t exposed week by week, and college football fans don’t have to get themselves worked up over something that ultimately doesn’t matter.
Could you imagine running a business like this? Or even the federal government? Where you just willfully taking a massive risk in communicating to your constituents that you are making it up as you go along week to week, until a final decision is made, seemingly at random, and leaving all your previous messaging completely obsolete?
Better yet, don’t imagine that.
About Matt Yoder