SMQ: College Football Playoff hopefuls and strength of schedule

Final Thoughts

When you get down to it, trying to decipher which teams have the best and worst strength of schedule is splitting hairs. Any one of these last nine teams in the running have played schedules better than the majority of the country.

A conference championship will still count for something. It is also true that teams which suffered no losses or a single loss will receive greater consideration than those which suffered two losses.

And it is also true that these are hardly hard and fast rules. In the College Football Playoff era, deciphering how the selection committee will rate the top four is often an exercise in futility. Reading the minds of a dozen selectors operating in an opaque system outside of the public eye is always going to be difficult.

Yet that is the fun of college football. We can think we know the way the committee will read the situation. That was the case with the TCU/Baylor/Ohio State question in 2014, as well as the Ohio State/Penn State question in 2016.

There will always be controversy. While there are double the access points that were available during the BCS era, there is also less transparency in how those four spots are selected. And even with four spots, there is always bound to be at least one team left disappointed on the outside looking in when the final tally is taken by the selection committee.

Next: College Football Playoff Top 25 Projections: Week 14

What this exercise proves, though, is that not all schedules are created equal. And often, our perception of a schedule’s strengths and weaknesses diverges from the way that various calculations rate a program’s strength of schedule. While their schedules are vastly similar when you split hairs and break down the composite SOS rankings, Alabama and Wisconsin are perceived to have played very different qualities of 2017 seasons. That is true of all nine of the remaining contenders that break out into the various groups seen here.