now.

First off, you are starting with the premise that Army will be undefeated at the end of the year. According to FPI, Army only has an 11.6% chance of beating Notre Dame. They then have an 88.1% chance of beating UTSA (which is a likely win).

That puts them as a prohibitive favorite to be playing in the AAC championship game, but they will only have a 10.2% chance of being undefeated at that point.

In the AAC Championship game, they have an 81.6% chance of playing Tulane, a 17.2% chance of playing Navy, and a 1.2% chance of playing Memphis or ECU. If they play Navy, they have a 62.9% chance of sinning that game. If they play Tulane, they are underdogs (according to FPI). They are heavy favorites against Memphis or ECU. Not knowing the specific odds against Tulane, I still think it's reasonable to say they have about a 50% chance of winning the title game. That means that the odds of Army winning the AAC championship is around 50% (as they are pretty much guaranteed to be in the title game). But the odds of them being an undefeated conference champion is only around 5%

So you are basing your premise on an undefeated Army being the AAC champ. But I would argue that there is only about a 5% chance that Army is an undefeated conference champion. There is a good chance they will be a 1-loss conference champion, however.


But even IF we say Army beats the odds and ends up undefeated. You have to take into consideration that (1) Notre Dame will have their second loss on the year, which will likely drop them down the rankings significantly. Yes, Army would jump up significantly, but I would be surprised if it was more than 10sh spots which still puts them around #14 or 15.

Now, if we get to BYU - if they win out they will most definitely finish the season ranked higher than both Boise St. and Army. If they drop a game, but still beat a ranked Colorado or Kansas St. in the Big 12 title game, I expect they would still be ranked above Army and Boise St. (as they would still have 3 wins over ranked opponents which is 2 more than Army and 3 more than Boise St.). If Colorado wins out and beats BYU, they will add a win over a top-10 opponent to their resume which would skyrocket them up the rankings as well (in which they are already significantly ahead of Army). If Colorado drops a game and it's Kansas St. winning out, then they would ALSO get a boost by beating a top-10 BYU and jump up the rankings as well - thus keeping them ahead of Army.

TLDR, this idea of an undefeated Army being ranked ahead of the B12 champ is based on (1) the extreme unlikelihood of Army beating Notre Dame, and (2) an assumption that the top 3 Big 12 teams (which are all ranked significantly ahead of Army right now) all drop below Army - which while it's very possible for one or 2 of them to do so, it is highly unlikely for all 3 of them to drop that low - especially when considering Army is very unlikely to go undefeated themselves. As such, while there may be greater than a 0% chance of Army finishing ahead of the B12 champ, I would argue those odds may only be around 2-3% at best.