rankings over the years. HOWEVER, you have to look at the circumstances behind those rankings. Here are the teams that had 3-losses and ranked in the top 10:


2023: No 3-loss teams in the Top 10.

2022: Two 3-loss teams in the Top 10: 10-3 Utah (#8) and 10-3 Kansas St. (#9). Both were conference champions and got a bump for winning their league title. Both would have also gotten into a 12-team playoff with an auto-bid and not as an at-large candidate. And had either lost their title game, they would have been on the outside looking in.

2021: No 3-loss teams in the Top 10. 10-3 Utah was #12, but again was only there because they got a bump for being PAC-12 champions.

2020: 8-3 Florida finished #7. This is also a weird year with plenty of teams not playing full schedules and any sort of rankings this season should be viewed as outliers IMO. HOWEVER, they were 8-2 at the end of the regular season and their 3rd loss came in a conference title game which the committee has typically been hesitant to punish teams too much for.

2019: 10-3 Wisconsin finished #8. Like Florida, they finished with 2 regular season losses (10-2), and their 3rd loss came in a conference title game.

2018: 10-3 Washington finished #9 after winning the PAC-12 title. Florida finished #10-#12 at 9-3 this year. HOWEVER, this season, there were only eight P5 teams with 2 or fewer losses, and the only one of those that finished below any 3-loss teams was 10-2 Washington St. This really would come down to an argument of whether a 9-3 SEC team was better than a 10-2 PAC-12 team (where neither won their division or played in a conference title game).

2017: 10-3 Auburn finished #7 this year. Again, this was a situation where they were 10-2 and then lost in their conference title game.

2016: 10-3 Wisconsin finished #8 and 10-3 Colorado finished #10. Yet again, these were both teams that were 10-2 and then lost in their conference title games.

2015: No 3-loss teams finished in the Top 10

2014: No 3-loss teams finished in the Top 10




So by my count I see nine 3-loss teams that finished in the committee's top-10. But of those nine teams, EIGHT of them finished 10-3 and either won their conference title game to get to 10-3 or lost their conference title game to drop from 10-2 to 10-3 (or 8-3 in the COVID year for Florida due to a reduced schedule). Only one of them finished the season at 9-3, and it was in a season that there were very few 10 win P5 teams at the end of the year - and you have to put SOMEONE in the rankings.



TLDR, what we can take from this is that 3-loss teams can definitely make the college football playoff - but only if they are 9-3 and win their conference title game to get to 10-3 and get an auto-bid, or if they are 10-2 and lose in their conference title game.

9-3 teams that don't play in their conference championship game are almost exclusively ranked outside of the top 10 (with the one exception being a year that there were relatively few 10-loss teams in the field). As such, I would argue that any 9-3 teams in the SEC, while they may fill up a bunch of spots in the 12-15 range, will find themselves hard pressed to be in a position to actually get an at-large bid in the CFP.