One of the most influential games remaining this season will be contested Saturday night. And, shockingly, it won’t contain an SEC team.
Yes, the SEC matters. Yes, barring something drastic, the SEC will get at least one team into the inaugural College Football Playoff. But that will be settled within the SEC. As long as the champion has one loss or fewer (and comes from the West or is named Georgia), they will be in. If three other conferences don’t have a champion that has a strong case to get in (we’ll discuss Notre Dame later), the SEC West runner-up will probably get in as well. The only question about the SEC is precisely which will be the winning team and who will be the runners-up.
When Notre Dame visits Florida State, though, entire conferences will be affected and tons of potential scenarios will be cleared up.
Let’s start with the possibilities of if Florida State wins. The Seminoles will pick up a much-needed quality win and their path to the CFP will be clearer. They will probably still be in a little bit of trouble if they pick up a loss in conference (more on that later), but their biggest obstacle remaining to making the playoff will be out of the way.
From Notre Dame’s perspective, the loss isn’t crippling. 11-1 and a loss to one of the top teams in the country in a road game won’t end Notre Dame’s CFP hopes. It will make things tougher, especially if four conferences have undefeated or 1-loss champions. But, overall, it won’t hurt Notre Dame too much.
It could hurt the Pac 12 conference, though. Notre Dame plays three of the Pac 12’s contenders. They have already beaten Stanford (who aren’t quite eliminated and will have the country’s best 11-2 resume if they win out) and still have to play USC and Arizona State. USC will be eliminated from the CFP with one more loss (they may be already) and Arizona State probably won’t have a strong enough 2-loss resume to be in the discussion. Let’s say that USC or Arizona State runs the table, though. Both need a very strong resume–USC to overcome a probably-not-good nonconference loss to Boston College and Arizona State to outweigh a blowout loss to UCLA–if they want to be in the discussion in December. A victory over an otherwise-undefeated and probably Top 5 Notre Dame would be a lot more valuable in that case than over a 2-loss and barely Top 15 Notre Dame.
It’s if Notre Dame wins, though, that will make things interesting. Florida State’s resume will probably need help, even if that’s unfair (I’ll get to that in a minute). Florida State gets Virginia and Miami in cross-division play, both of whom are actually pretty solid teams. They also face Boston College and Louisville in division and have already beaten Clemson. They will also face Florida in a regular season-ending nonconference game.
The problem is that none of these teams really move the needle on the national stage. In fact, it’s likely that Clemson is the only one who ends up ranked, if even them. Every single one of those teams already has at least two losses and, with the exception of Clemson, will probably pick up another one when they play Florida State.
This brings us to a major issue, which we will hopefully deal with in depth in a later post. Still, this article by Jerry Palm on CBSSports is a must-read to try to understand how the committee will judge SOS. And, the important thing is that, other than opponents winning percentage numbers, the committee won’t really be using an SOS number. The BCS computers each used to have their own way to calculate SOS, but at least they had them.
Now, an average team in a power conference is usually a solid, top 60 team. It’s never a given win and certainly not a cupcake. Good SOS formulas show this. Playing eight solid teams is often just as tough or tougher than playing three very good teams and five very bad ones. Now, Florida State’s SOS would be nothing close to what a Pac 12 or some SEC West teams would be, but it would still be a respectable number.
If the committee doesn’t use any real SOS numbers and just uses the common but awful “eyeball SOS” test, Florida State could fail miserably. This wouldn’t quite be fair, but it can definitely happen–certainly in the eyes of at least a few committee members. If the committee decides to subjectively judge SOS as “number of really good teams played”, Florida State could end up 1-1 in that statistic if they lose to Notre Dame.
The Seminoles are probably the ACC’s only hope at reaching the CFP. Duke and Georgia Tech are the only other 1-loss teams and it’s highly unlikely that either of them run the table from here. The fact is, though, that if Florida State loses this game against Notre Dame, the ACC will take the back seat (probably behind the Big Ten) in the chase to get teams into the CFP.
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