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Nov 12, 2024
12:51:07pm
cougarfan84 All-American
I get what she's saying about 13 3-loss teams ranked in the top 10 of the CFP
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.
cougarfan84
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