College Football Playoff Rankings: The Bear's Metrics

Chris, help me out on the metric on what the committee looks at when it comes to picking these teams. Last week, it was all over the board. I couldn't tell what it was. I mean, strength of schedule, you know, one loss, who you lost to. I get that. I mean, but is there a metric that they're going by? It just seems that it's kind of chaotic and really loose. I think the metric that people should look at, and this is something going back to my days at ESPN that we like to talk about, was that strength of record metric, which is kind of what you would do, what you achieve against the schedule you have in front of you. But it kind of tries to balance out how 9-3 can be better than 10-2 and things like that based on the strength of schedule, location of the game, and results in all of those metrics. Strength of record is probably the biggest one, but you saw the committee did value head-to-head a lot of times in the first ranking. In some cases, they followed strength of schedule in some areas as well. But you're right. It really was all over the place because people got wound up about Tennessee not being ranked ahead of Alabama, but really they had Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, that trio kind of. You can't really go head-to-head-to-head in that fashion because there's three teams involved. But the one team that really – but at the same time, Ohio State was right by eight spots ahead of USC, and USC had just beaten them by double digits. So, like, people don't bring that up. People just like to piss and moan about the SEC because they hate the SEC and don't want the SEC to get all these teams in the playoffs. But the Indiana ranking was the one that really was curious to me because you talked about we don't know what they're looking at. Okay, you're supposed to look at strength of schedule, and you think, okay. Indiana's strength of schedule isn't very good, and they didn't play anybody in the non-conference. Okay, well, let's look at big wins. Well, Indiana didn't have a big win. They beat nobody. Okay, well, let's use a football judgment and look at Indiana. You've seen Indiana play last month. They needed a 60-yard miracle field goal to go to overtime against Minnesota at home. They went to overtime in a game they probably should have lost against Michigan, and Michigan is terrible. They needed a fourth-quarter comeback against Nebraska, who hasn't won in over a month. You beat Ohio State on a late call. You lost to Ohio State, rather. I don't know. You know, with the offense. Offensively, they're not very good right now. So that was a baffling rank. But again, it's all correctable, and we'll see ultimately what happens tonight.