SMQ: Which 1-loss teams are still College Football Playoff contenders?

Which one-loss teams are still in the hunt for a College Football Playoff spot? Sunday Morning Quarterback tackles the question after Week 2 action.

As many as six different teams with at least one loss could still be ranked in the AP Top 25 after a wild second full weekend of college football. In the days of the College Football Playoff, a single loss ostensibly does not take a team out of the running for the national title.

But is that really the case? Now that the field has expanded to four teams instead of the top-two pairing that marked the Bowl Coalition, Bowl Alliance, and BCS eras, the expanded field allows for one-loss teams to make it into the playoff picture.

The idea that a team has longer to overcome an early loss than a late loss is essentially a truism at this point. A lot more is forgiven if a team can actually get back to winning ways and keep winning after that first defeat.

But is the dictum that an early loss is less costly than a late one true?

Last week, I talked about how Florida State’s loss to Alabama was largely meaningless. They lost Deondre Francois for the season, which was definitely impactful. But the Seminoles remained highly ranked despite falling big on neutral turf to the SEC favorite and No. 1 team in the country. But how often do teams manage to rebuild their resume and actually rebound into a top-four spot after such a loss?

Over the past 25 years since the formation of the Bowl Coalition in 1992, there have only been five instances where a team has come back from taking a loss in their first two games of the season and come back to finish in the top four of the relevant ranking of the period.

All of those comebacks occurred in the BCS or College Football Playoff era. A few teams did manage to finish in the top six during the Bowl Coalition and Bowl Alliance periods from 1992 through 1997, but none made it into a top-four spot. Neither the Big Ten nor the Pac-10 had a team pull off the feat either during that period, rendering those six years moot for the point of this evaluation. Anything earlier than 1992 is essentially a different era of college football altogether.

So we have 19 seasons of data to look at, meaning that a team has recovered from an early defeat in just over a quarter of the seasons played. Another few have fallen short in their quests to recover from a loss to finish fifth.

So which 1-loss team could become the sixth team in two decades?

To answer the question of which one-loss teams still have a shot at the College Football Playoff, let’s look at the five teams that managed to succeed in breaking into what would have been a playoff berth under past iterations of the BCS formula. Had a plus-one model come into existence earlier, it likely would have incorporated some combination of human and computer evaluation as the BCS packaged it for public consumption.

So we will use these three case studies to answer the main question at the heart of today’s Saturday Morning Quarterback. Continue on to read more about each of the five teams that pulled off a top-four finish prior to the bowls. and how each of the possible contenders relate to these past success stories as they try to impress the current selection committee.