College Football Playoff announces changes to how it assesses strength of schedule for teams

The College Football Playoff formally announced it is changing the criteria its 13-member selection committee utilizes to assess a team’s schedule strength and how teams perform against their respective schedules when evaluating its weekly rankings in the upcoming 2025 college football season.

This change addresses concerns about the committee’s devaluing of strength of schedule metrics raised by the Southeastern Conference after a trio of SEC teams — Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina — missed out on the original 12-team Playoff field despite all having more favorable strength of schedules metrics compared to Playoff teams such as Indiana and SMU.

“Changes for the upcoming season include enhancements to the tools that the selection committee uses to assess schedule strength and how teams perform against their schedule. The current schedule strength metric has been adjusted to apply greater weight to games against strong opponents,” the College Football Playoff release stated. “An additional metric, record strength, has been added to the selection committee’s analysis to go beyond a team’s schedule strength to assess how a team performed against that schedule. This metric rewards teams defeating high-quality opponents while minimizing the penalty for losing to such a team. Conversely, these changes will provide minimal reward for defeating a lower quality opponent while imposing a greater penalty for losing to such a team.”

Last season, Indiana (11-1) and SMU (11-2) were awarded the Playoff’s 10th and 11th seeds, respectively — pushing out No. 11 Alabama (9-3) as well as fellow 9-win SEC teams Ole Miss and South Carolina — despite the 11-win Hoosiers and Mustangs having the nation’s No. 35 and 41st strength of schedule, per ESPN’s FPI rankings. By comparison, the Crimson Tide’s SOS was ranked No. 20 nationally, with the Gamecocks right behind at 21st. The Rebels’ final SOS was 37th — right between Indiana and SMU.

Alabama’s omission prompted extreme outrage from throughout the SEC, including most vocally from SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, who spearheaded a PR campaign to correct the CFP selection committee’s voting criteria in order to give more importance to strength of schedule, a metric that tends to favor more balanced conferences and teams that schedule fellow Power Four teams.

Earlier this Spring, Sankey admitted the SEC’s ongoing conversation about the future of its conference scheduling model — whether it remains at eight conference games or adds a ninth game like the Big Ten — hinges on how the CFP selection committee values SOS moving forward.

“I think the CFP selection process has become a much bigger deal,” Sankey said in May. “And, again, if you go back … I said CFP selection. We’re gonna go through this 16-team, eight-game, first time. We have schools that think about bowl games, primarily, in that, but the question is about the selection process, not criticism of the committee. But criteria and process are meaningful.”

The CFP selection committee also announced a procedural change to the recusal process for a committee member, establishing a distinction between a “full recusal” that is consistent with the previous policy and a “partial recusal” which would allow a committee member to remain in the room for the discussion portion but still removes them from the voting process.

Kalen DeBoer fires back at College Football Playoff committee over Alabama snub

Second-year Crimson Tide head coach Kalen DeBoer continued to poke at the CFP selection committee process earlier this Spring at the SEC’s annual Spring Meetings in Destin, Fla.

“You wonder what would have happened if other people would have played our schedule,” DeBoer said in Destin, according to On3’s Brett McMurphy.

At the time, then-CFP selection committee chairman Warde Manuel cited the key factors in play regarding SMU and Alabama’s spots. He pointed out the Mustangs’ losses came to ranked teams while the Crimson Tide suffered unranked losses, which ultimately made the difference as SMU made the bracket despite falling in the ACC Championship.

Still, the debate continued about whether Alabama should have been in the field. In fact, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey also pointed out how the committee evaluates strength of schedule and the questions for the committee in the first year of the new format.

“I don’t know that I’d say surprised. I think that’s one of the realities,” Sankey said. “But I spoke in July at media days, asking how will a 9-3 team, and I used Georgia as a really good example given their three really difficult road games, how do you evaluate that against other teams that don’t come anywhere close to that?

“And as I said, we learned something the first time through (the 12-team playoff selection process). And that raises the need for deeper analysis and understanding. If we’re gonna just incentivize wins, playing fewer winning teams can get your to more wins. I don’t think that’s great for the football.”

— On3’s Nick Schultz contributed to this report.