With teams like Auburn and Iowa suffering their first losses of the season, let’s look at the record of one-loss teams in the College Football Playoff race.
After the first weekend of October in the 150th season in college football history, there are just 16 undefeated teams remaining among the 130 FBS programs around the country.
Four of those — Boise State, SMU, Memphis and Appalachian State — are already effectively eliminated from College Football Playoff contention by dint of their membership in one of the Group of Five conferences. That effectively leaves a dozen teams trying to reach December with unblemished records.
But as we have seen over the first five years of the College Football Playoff, it is highly unlikely that four Power Five teams will reach the end of the regular season without a loss on their record. 2018 marked the first time that three Power Five teams reached the end of the regular season unbeaten; before that three of the four teams in the semifinals sported a loss before the postseason, while 2017 saw no teams reach that point with perfect records.
That bodes well for the 11 programs from one of the five major conferences that are currently sitting with just one loss on their records. Auburn and Iowa joined that club this weekend, as the Tigers fell by 11 points at the Swamp and Iowa dropped a defensive battle against Michigan by a touchdown.
Are any of those 11 teams actually eliminated at this point of the season? In this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback, let’s dive in to see how teams from the past have fared in front of the College Football Playoff selection committee when they have a regular-season loss to factor into the equation.
First, let’s set the terms of the investigation
For the purposes of this study, we have to determine teams that had a legitimate consideration for a spot in the College Football Playoff. With the cut line at four teams each season, I have also included the next two teams out to assess whether those teams had unique circumstances that kept them from inclusion where other programs were able to weather their lone defeats.
That offers 30 potential teams that had a legitimate claim to a spot in the semifinals. Six of those teams made the Playoff field with perfect records, and five more of those top-six programs were kept out of the four-team field after dropping two games in the regular season.
That leaves 19 teams to consider today. 14 of the 19 teams included reached the semifinals, while the other five were on the outside looking in at the bracket. These 19 teams serve as our basis of comparison for the 11 teams currently holding one loss at this point of the 2019 campaign.
The two main questions we are asking today are:
- Is there a cutoff point in terms of when a loss will eliminate a team from College Football Playoff consideration?
- Is there a specific point where a margin of defeat is too much to overcome for a College Football Playoff hopeful?
While there is still an incredibly small sample size still available to analyze, we can at least start to see if there are general trends forming in the way the selection committee perceives a team’s claim on a semifinal spot.
What is the difference between a qualifier and a non-qualifier?
In essence, there really isn’t that much that separates qualifiers from non-qualifiers. The quintet of top-six teams that have missed the playoff with one loss does feature a few differences between the group of 14 teams that made the field with a blemish.
Here is what those differences look like when charted out; teams that missed the field are highlighted in light yellow with red text.
Only six of the 14 teams that reached the College Football Playoff with a loss suffered that defeat against a ranked team. Three of the five teams kept out of the Playoff were defeated by a ranked opponent. It is probably not statistically relevant, and it is hard to imagine the selection committee is explicitly looking for teams that struggled against unranked foes instead of programs on their radar.
More significant, though, is likely when teams lose and how they lose. Let’s look more closely at those two factors to answer the central questions of the study.
The impact of when teams lose on playoff qualification
When a team loses doesn’t necessarily determine whether or not they will be chosen by the selection committee as one of the top four teams in the country in a given year. Teams have reached the field after losing early in the season. That was the case for Ohio State in 2014, when lost to an unranked Virginia Tech squad in Week 2, and for Alabama a year later after they fell at home against a top-15 Ole Miss team.
Similarly, losing late in the season is not necessarily a death sentence. Alabama proved that point in 2017 when the Crimson Tide reached the College Football Playoff despite falling in the Iron Bowl against Auburn. That opened the door for the Tigers rather than the Tide to play in the SEC championship game, and when they lost to Georgia the door was reopened for Nick Saban’s crew to sneak into the field for a fourth straight season.
In general, however, teams that make the College Football Playoff tend to lose in one of the first three weeks of October. Seven of the 14 one-loss teams to make the field took their defeat sometime between Weeks 6 and 8, with two of the remaining seven losing in September and the other five taking their loss in November.
Given those figures, it would seem at first glance to be better to lose earlier than later in the season. Yet looking at the teams that finished at No. 5 or No. 6 seems to negate that contention. The five teams that missed the field dropped their game on average two or three weeks later than the teams that made the Playoff. Three of those teams lost right in the sweet spot of October play.
The other two, though, dropped their conference championship games. That seems to be too late to overcome the first defeat of the season. It looks as though recency bias tends to keep the committee from opting to include a conference finalist that failed to emerge as the champion.
That was the case for Iowa in 2015, when they dropped the Big Ten championship against a Michigan State team that qualified for the four-team bracket, and it happened again two years later when Wisconsin lost in Indianapolis against a two-loss Ohio State team that also missed the playoff.
The impact of how teams lose on playoff qualification
Margin of defeat plays less of a factor in whether a team makes the playoff than one might initially expect. Losing to a ranked opponent by less than a touchdown has kept teams out of the College Football Playoff field, while double-digit defeats have not been damaging enough to keep other squads out of the bracket.
On average, teams that reach the semifinals with one loss tend to suffer that loss by 7.6 points. Teams that fall just outside the cut line, on the other hand, lose by an average of 11 points. But those averages, once again, are skewed by the outliers in a pair of small sample sizes. Looking at the individual results is far more revelatory.
Losing by 14 points at home against an unranked Virginia Tech team was not the end of the world for eventual College Football Playoff champion Ohio State in 2014. Baylor, on the other hand, wasn’t able to overcome a 14-point road loss against an unranked West Virginia team that same season.
Alabama lost their last game of the 2017 regular season by 12 points and missed out on the SEC championship game in the process. That same season, Wisconsin went 12-0 through the end of November to play in the Big Ten championship. The Badgers lost by just six points against Ohio State, but they did not receive the benefit of the doubt where Alabama did despite losing by half as many points to a similar quality of opponent as the Crimson Tide.
What does that mean for one-loss teams at this point of the season?
The 2019 field of one-loss Power Five teams thus all still have a shot at reaching the Playoff. Even those dozen teams that still sport undefeated records can lose at any point before the conference championship games and still have a legitimate chance of breaking through to the final four.
Let’s look quickly at how those 11 teams lost and how they correlate to previous examples from the first five years of the College Football Playoff.
- Arizona (4-1): lost by seven points (45-38) at Hawaii in Week 0
- Oregon (4-1): lost by six points (27-21) vs. No. 16 Auburn in Arlington, Texas in Week 1
- Missouri (4-1): lost by six points (37-31) at Wyoming in Week 1
- Texas (4-1): lost by seven points (45-38) vs. No. 6 LSU in Week 2
- Notre Dame (4-1): lost by six points (23-17) at No. 3 Georgia in Week 4
- Michigan (4-1): lost by 21 points (35-14) at No. 13 Wisconsin in Week 4
- Arizona State (4-1): lost by three points (34-31) vs. Colorado in Week 4
- Utah (4-1): lost by seven points (30-23) at USC in Week 4
- Virginia (4-1): lost by 15 points (35-20) at No. 10 Notre Dame in Week 5
- Auburn (5-1): lost by 11 points (34-23) at No. 10 Florida in Week 6
- Iowa (4-1): lost by seven points (10-3) at No. 19 Michigan in Week 6
At least one of these teams, or a team that will lose in the next fortnight, is almost certain to make that jump back into a top-four position before the end of the year. Just as likely is that a couple of these teams are fighting just on the margins of the bracket.
Ultimately, neither margin of victory nor the point in a season when a team loses seems to have much statistical significance when it comes to seeing whether a one-loss squad will be in or out of the College Football Playoff field. This speaks at once to the unique nature of each college football season, as well as the subjective nature of a selection committee that is not beholden to any precedent in their decision-making process.