The College Football Playoff says it’s making some changes to the way it evaluates teams during the 2025 college football season.
The playoff announced Wednesday that it was making “enhancements to the tools that the selection committee uses to assess schedule strength and how teams perform against their schedule. The changes come after 9-3 Alabama was the first team left out of the playoff and ended the season ranked ahead of 10-2 Miami.
“The current schedule strength metric has been adjusted to apply greater weight to games against strong opponents,” the playoff’s release said. “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.”
Based on the paragraph above, we’re not sure if the playoff committee would have changed the way it ranked anyone in the top 15 a year ago. Though the Crimson Tide beat Georgia, Missouri and LSU, two of its losses were to teams that finished the regular season at 6-6. Alabama’s third loss came by 21 points to Oklahoma in the penultimate week of the season.
Miami, meanwhile, lost on the road to a 7-5 Georgia Tech team and a 9-3 Syracuse team. The Hurricanes didn’t have any wins over teams who were ranked at the time of those games, though Louisville and Duke finished the season at 9-4.
The CFP also said that it wouldn’t make a rule prohibiting teams’ rankings from changing ahead of the final set of rankings if those teams are not playing on conference championship weekend.
“The selection committee reaffirmed that movement in the final week should be evidence-based and did not recommend creating a formal policy prohibiting such movement,” the playoff said.
The first set of playoff rankings will be released on Tuesday, Nov. 4 and there will be five sets of rankings before the final rankings that set the playoff field will be released on Sunday, Dec. 7. The top four teams in the 12-team playoff will again get byes this season, though the top four teams will be the top four teams in the rankings, and not the four highest-ranked conference champions.
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