Booger McFarland, Joey Galloway make case for Texas A&M to be No. 1 in CFP over Ohio State

The first College Football Playoff rankings were released on Tuesday evening, and Booger McFarland and Joey Galloway have issue with the No. 1 team. Ohio State claimed the top spot in the initial rankings with Indiana coming in at No. 2 and Texas A&M at No. 3.

Immediately after the rankings were announced, McFarland took the opportunity to make a case for the Aggies to be in that No. 1 spot. He argued that their resume, which includes a win against Notre Dame, is better than the Buckeyes at this point.

“I think Texas A&M’s resume, to this point and the way they’ve looked, deserves to be No. 1,” he said. “When you look at Indiana what they’ve done going on the road to beat Oregon, I would even put them No. 1. I don’t know if I would put Ohio State at No. 1 based on what they’ve done. Now, they still have road in front of them, but to Joey’s point, Indiana and Texas A&M, I think they’ve done more so far.”

The Aggies have the No. 1 strength of record in the country to this point according to ESPN. Additionally, they are No. 15 in strength of schedule.

By comparison, Indiana and Ohio State are No. 2 and No. 3 in strength of record, respectively. The Hoosiers also have the No. 39 strength of schedule while the Buckeyes are No. 33.

There’s still plenty of football left and it’s really not worth debating much until the final ranking, but Galloway finds it hard to believe by those metrics that the Aggies aren’t currently the best team. He also pointed to Ohio State’s best win, which came in the season opener against Texas, as being suspect.

“This tells me that they’re going a lot on eye test here,” Galloway said. “Because if we’re going on ranking and analytics, Texas A&M is best analytically over Indiana and Ohio State. So they’re going a lot off of eye test. And when you start telling me we’re going off eye test, now all of a sudden we have no idea where this thing is going.

“Because when you talk resume and you talk about their best win, the Texas team we saw this week play Vandy, that was their best game. They looked like the Texas we expected to see. They weren’t that team early on in the season. They weren’t for large periods. So you say who’s (Ohio State’s) best win? A Texas team that didn’t look great early. This surprises me because it’s a lot of eye test and I don’t trust eye test as much as I do analytics.”

We’ll see where Texas A&M ends up at the end of the year, but for now the Aggies are focused on continuing to pave their path to the SEC Championship game. They next face Missouri this weekend.