Hypothetical football was the SEC\u2019s friend a year ago, though not an especially helpful one: Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina surely would have thumped the cutesy Indiana Hoosiers at any point on any field in 2024, but one loss to the only formidable team on a soft IU schedule was enough to make the College Football Playoff field over those three-loss survivors of bona fide gauntlets.<\/p>\n
(And then SMU stayed ahead of those three after losing the ACC title game to Clemson, and an offseason full of SEC whining \u2014 the league sets the college football standard for that as well \u2014 was assured.)<\/p>\n
Hypothetical football favors the Big Ten now. It favors Big Ten power Indiana. The unbeaten Hoosiers and unbeaten Ohio State Buckeyes have looked like the best two teams in college football this season, consistently dominant on both sides of the ball and led by precise, Heisman-hunting quarterbacks. Both are metrics darlings. Put Indiana and the SEC\u2019s top team at the moment, Texas A&M, on a neutral field and I\u2019ll take the Hoosiers by a touchdown (AI doesn\u2019t love IU quite as much but would favor the Hoosiers by three or four points, because I know you were wondering).<\/p>\n
Indiana is playing like a dominant team and has arguably the best win of the season to its name, at Oregon. Yet the one thing the 2025 edition of the College Football Playoff selection committee absolutely had to do with its initial rankings<\/a>? Rank Texas A&M over Indiana.<\/p>\n And it failed.<\/p>\n Welcome to complaining season!<\/p>\n You can gripe about no Group of 5 teams in the top 25, no respect for the ACC or the excessive eight-spot gap between No. 10 Notre Dame and No. 18 Miami \u2014 Miami beat Notre Dame, giving Miami a better win than Notre Dame possesses \u2014 if you like. I\u2019m going to make like Greg Sankey and wonder aloud why all this talk of increased emphasis on schedule strength did not produce tangible results right away.<\/p>\n Ohio State at No. 1 is fine. The season-opening win over Texas (No. 11 in the initial rankings) is gaining value, and overpowering wins at No. 23 Washington and Illinois matter. That resonates a bit more than the unbeaten Aggies\u2019 win at Notre Dame and underwhelming-to-date SEC results \u2014 it\u2019s not the fault of Mike Elko\u2019s team that a blowout win at LSU evokes a shrug at this point, but that\u2019s how things have gone. Wins over Auburn and Arkansas (two teams that, like LSU, have fired their coaches this season) by a combined nine points does not convey dominance.<\/p>\n But we care more about strength of schedule now, right? The CFP put out a news release in August declaring that the \u201ccurrent schedule strength metric has been adjusted to apply greater weight to games against strong opponents.\u201d<\/p>\n We, of course, don\u2019t have access to the committee\u2019s numbers. They will always reserve the right to throw a dash of \u201cjust because\u201d into the stew. But The Athletic\u2019s Austin Mock ranks Texas A&M No. 1 in \u201cstrength of record,\u201d compared with No. 3 for Indiana and No. 6 for Ohio State. He has the Aggies\u2019 schedule strength at No. 14, with Indiana at 45 and Ohio State at 64. ESPN also has the Aggies at No. 1 in its \u201cstrength of record\u201d metric, followed by Indiana and then Ohio State. ESPN ranks the schedule strengths 15, 39 and 33, in that order.<\/p>\n