Auburn With Two Losses Would Be More Deserving of a Playoff Spot Than Michigan State With One

The debate is coming. Should a two-loss SEC West team get into a playoff over another one-loss team from another conference? While we don’t know for sure how teams will end up, there is a very high likelihood that every team but one in the SEC West will have at least two losses.

In order for that not to happen, one of the following must happen in the showdowns between the Mississippi and Alabama schools:

• One team gets swept, and the others all go 2-1 in the head to head contests, and then two of those teams manage to get through the rest of the season unscathed;
• Two of the teams go 2-1 (or one goes 3-0 and the other 2-1) and also manage to avoid a second loss in all other games.

Alabama and Auburn have already lost, to Mississippi and Mississippi State respectively.

On Tuesday, Ty Duffy went through the remaining schedules of the top 15 teams in the AP poll. Michigan State comes out as the easiest playing against the Big Ten; Auburn has the most difficult with trips to Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia ahead.

It is for that reason, I suppose, that Michigan State is a favorite to win the national championship based on losing to Oregon and . . . winning at home against Nebraska? It appears to be based on how they think the committee will operate, along with the chances that Michigan State closes at 12-1, including a projected Big Ten championship game victory.

But I thought I would try to take a look at how a true national championship contender should do against each team’s schedule. To do this, I looked back at the teams that were in the Top 4 of the AP poll at the end of the regular season, including the conference championship games, and then compared their records against various levels of competition. To make that comparison, I used the simple rating system (SRS) rankings at sports-reference.com/cfb, also noting whether games were at home, road, or neutral.

The first lesson is that end up being voted as top 4 teams rarely lose (if you didn’t know that): a total of 47 losses for the 40 teams including bowl games.

Over half (25) of those losses came to teams who were in the top 5 in the SRS, so slugfests between national championship contenders. These teams rarely lost at home, besides to the top elite teams. In fact, the lowest ranked team by SRS to win at a team that ended up top 4 in the final regular season rankings was South Carolina (#32 in 2007) winning at Georgia. Top 4 teams went a combined 54-3 at home against teams that finished between 6th and 30th in the SRS rankings. In other words, bowl caliber teams from major conferences.

On the road, bad losses were rare. Oklahoma (at #58 Colorado in 2007) and Oklahoma State (at #52 Iowa State in 2012) are the only two times a top 4 team had lost to a team rated outside the top 50 on the road.

What does this mean? When it comes to national championship contenders, playing a schedule against Directional State School and Alabama is much tougher than playing Maryland and Michigan, even if the combined winning percentages are similar in a base strength of schedule comparison. In other words, the difficulty of one’s schedule depends on the perspective. For an elite team, playing multiple other top contenders is going to lead to a worse record, all other things being equal, than a balanced one.

Which brings us to Auburn. They play at Alabama, at Mississippi, at Mississippi State, at Georgia, and at Kansas State. Given the road nature of those games, the true “best team in the country” would have extreme difficulty going undefeated against that gauntlet. 3-2 against that slate is a pretty good result.

Which is more impressive? Going 3-2 in those five road games, and going undefeated in all others OR losing at Oregon, winning at home against Ohio State, and winning all others?

That’s the decision the committee may be truly facing.

Using the win percentages for Top 4 teams over the last decade, here is how an elite team should perform in order to finish top 4 against their schedule.

What this says is that a typical top 4 team would have an average of 11.5 wins against Michigan State’s schedule, and 9.7 against Auburn’s. That’s a fairly large difference and suggests that going 10-2 in the SEC West (while also playing at Georgia and Kansas State) is far more of an accomplishment than going 11-1 in the Big Ten. Auburn plays the most difficult schedule of any top team in the last decade, with four road games against likely top 10 teams by season’s end.

All four SEC West teams have the lowest win expectation, and should at least be “in the conversation” if they get to 10-2 (or 11-2 with a SEC title win). Kansas State and Oklahoma State, based on the fact they both play each of Baylor, Oklahoma, and TCU, should also be in the discussion.

Florida State and Notre Dame should be an elimination game, particularly for Florida State, but given that Michigan State is currently so highly thought of while playing in a conference that has performed poorly, who knows?

I guess we’ll find out what the committee values, but it shouldn’t be so simple as 11-1 is better than 10-2.