There will be no college football played on Nov. 24, which is three days before the Thanksgiving holiday and four before an avalanche of 13 games to keep all the non-shoppers busy on Black Friday. If those who run the sport pay attention, though, that Monday could teach them so much about how to properly execute a season to lead into a playoff to crown a champion.
The Players Era Festival will begin that day in Las Vegas, with 18 major men’s basketball programs each playing three games against the others gathered there. Five major programs are also included in the Maui Invitational field. All of them will be seeking to improve their credentials as candidates to be included in March Madness and be seeded as prominently as possible.
In these events, the Battle 4 Atlantis, the Baha Mar Championship, the ESPN Events Invitational Magic tournament, and other assorted non-league matchups, college basketball establishes which teams and conferences are performing at a high level within a given season and, therefore, worthy of postseason reward.
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College football, as a whole, has not learned this lesson.
Wednesday, the College Football Playoff committee announced it was tweaking the schedule strength metric employed to help select the teams that enter the 12-team field without earning one of five automatic bids. The idea is "to apply greater weight to games against strong opponents." There will also be a “record strength” metric that enhances rewards for defeating strong opponents and minimizes the punishment of losing such games.
The problem this declaration ignores is that there are no ideal metrics in college football — be it a measurement of team accomplishment or schedule strength. This is because there is almost no intersection among the most powerful conferences, which means ascertaining whether the Big Ten or SEC or ACC or Big 12 is strongest is essentially impossible.
Let’s look at the two most powerful conferences, winners of nine of the 11 titles in the CFP era.
Southeastern Conference teams have 18 games scheduled for 2025 against opponents from other Power 4 leagues. That’s only two more than they’ll play against FCS teams. There are another 30 games against opponents from Group of 5 leagues.
Big Ten teams have 12 games against outside P4 opponents. For a league that has 18 members, that does not feel like a lot. They also play a nine-game conference schedule compared to the SEC’s eight games, which means B1G teams will play a total of 12 more P4 games this year.
The SEC at last is expanding to a nine-game league schedule in 2026. It also ordered that all teams will need to schedule "at least one additional high quality non-conference from the Atlantic Coast, Big Ten or Big 12 conferences or Notre Dame each season." That mandate nudges college football in the right direction, but more leagues would need to follow to get us closer to identifying what league is strongest in a given season or the true value of its best teams’ records.
Former UCLA coach Rick Neuheisel, now an analyst for CBS Sports, said on the “Full Ride” SiriusXM program he co-hosts with Chris Childers that the College Football Playoff committee should have declared from its inception that playing high-end opponents in non-conference games would be valued. Winning such games would matter more; losing them would not be overwhelmingly punitive.
Like in basketball.
That would have led to more games like the Texas-Ohio State game (Aug. 30), Michigan-Oklahoma (Sept. 6), or Alabama-Wisconsin (Sept. 13). Those are the only three Big Ten-SEC games we will see this side of the playoff in 2025.
The CFP committee release said members spent six months reviewing their procedures to come up with the new plan for 2025. Frankly, that admission is sad. It ought to have been transacted in six days — six days that passed more than a decade ago. That might have led to programs making different scheduling decisions for the future.
To the extent the college football power structure cared about determining a national champion — and that wasn’t a lot until recently — the presentation of that crown largely has involved which team could maintain a perfect record the longest, preferably all the way through the postseason. Until the CFP can engineer more ambitious scheduling across the sport, that probably remains the fairest approach.
I recently had an exchange on Twitter with a person who compiles computer rankings who objected to my contention that college football lacks sufficient data to determine true achievement much beyond what’s reflected in win-loss records.
There was no way to dispute my contention that there aren’t many games among members of different power conferences, so he countered with, “So we don’t learn anything from the games against non FCS and non P4?”
The obvious answer is: no.
Alabama played Western Kentucky, South Florida, and Mercer last season and won those games by a combined score of 157-23. Should we have inferred from these results that Alabama was a titan? In games against P4 opponents, they finished just 6-4 with losses to Vanderbilt and Oklahoma teams that were .500 in the regular season.
There are those who suspect this latest announcement is aimed toward teams that were selected for the first 12-team CFP with only modest success against “ranked” teams. Indiana and coach Curt Cignetti earned no such victories, and Louisville and Pitt both eventually fell from the polls after losing to SMU.
The Hoosiers and Mustangs struggled on the road in CFP games against opponents that were underseeded because of the (now abandoned) system that mandated top-four seeds for automatic bid winners. Tennessee was also blown out, but it faced far less backlash, even though its lone win over a CFP-ranked team was against the Alabama squad whose shortcomings I already listed.
It’s impossible to know if those suspicions are correct without seeing what CFP committee members do with this new emphasis on schedule and record strength. However they use each tool, though, they’ll be wielding a mirage.