College Football Playoff Committee Adds Secret New Metric, Offers No Explanation of How It Works

The College Football Playoff selection committee, which decides which 12 teams reach the postseason each year, has announced it will begin using a new metric this season: strength of conference. As with the other tools the committee relies on, it has not disclosed how that metric is calculated.

ESPN’s Heather Dinich reported that the committee will incorporate the new data point in late November to help separate teams within the same league that have similar records but different levels of competition. She wrote on X that it would help “separate teams in the SAME LEAGUE with similar records based on the strength of their conference opponents,” citing Penn State as an example of a team that doesn’t play Oregon, Ohio State or Indiana. She added that it would also help distinguish teams with comparable records across different conferences based on how tough their league opponents were.

What the committee has not said is what data feeds that judgment. Win-loss record? Appearances in the AP Top 25? Computer-driven analytics? An eye test? The public has no way to check the committee’s math because the committee has never shown it.

That lack of transparency matters because the stakes for programs are enormous. Only 12 teams make the field. Coaching careers, conference reputations, and television revenue all turn on whether a team is judged to be in or out. Every year there is a team ranked 13th that believes it deserved a spot, a Power 4 program that feels bumped by a Group of 6 school, and conferences lobbying publicly for more of their own members to be included.

Committee members have long said they weigh strength of schedule and a team’s overall resume, but they have never detailed the formulas or criteria behind those judgments. Adding a new, similarly undefined metric does not resolve that problem — it multiplies it, giving the committee another lever to pull without giving the public any way to see how, or why, it is pulled.

Fans and analysts already use a range of measures to argue about who belongs: head-to-head results, so-called “ranked wins,” and objective analytics-based rating systems. Ranked wins can be deceptive — Texas A&M currently counts as a ranked win for LSU even though few observers consider the Aggies a genuine top-25 team. Analytics-based systems are generally viewed as more objective because they are less susceptible to bias toward a particular school or conference.

That objectivity — metrics that can be checked, replicated and defended — should be the standard for a committee making decisions with this much financial and professional consequence for the athletes, coaches and universities involved. Whether the addition of a secret strength-of-conference metric moves the process closer to that standard, or simply gives the committee more room to operate without accountability, will not be clear until the rankings are released and picked apart later this season.