College football is just as much politics as it is football, this time of year. So, naturally, some politicians are letting their opinions be known.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) is the latest to jump into the fray.
On Sunday, DeSantis waded into deep, controversial waters when he got involved with perhaps the most raging debate in college football: Should 10-2 Miami get in the College Football Playoff (CFP) over 10-2 Notre Dame? The two schools met in the first week of the season, a game Miami won 27-24.
However, the committee has consistently ranked the Irish ahead of Miami, mainly because the Hurricanes’ losses have come against unranked teams. Notre Dame’s two losses have come against Miami (12th in CFP) and Texas A&M (3rd in CFP).
DeSantis, captioning an X post that showed Notre Dame with better betting odds than Miami for making the playoff, relayed his concern that choosing a two-loss Notre Dame over a two-loss Miami, and ignoring the fact that Miami beat Notre Dame, would “erode the importance” of college football’s regular season.
“If ND gets in and Miami doesn’t, it will further erode the importance of the regular season,” DeSantis wrote. “I’m OK with both getting in, but identical records should mean the head-to-head is the tiebreaker if you have to choose between them.”
This is a natural reaction, and plenty of Miami fans are making this case precisely on social media. However, are Miami and Notre Dame’s records “identical?”
Again, Notre Dame lost to two highly-ranked football teams. Miami lost to two unranked, frankly subpar teams. One of which (SMU) missed its chance to play for the ACC Championship this weekend after losing to a California team that fired its coach the week before.
This isn’t the NFL, where wins and losses need not be scrutinized because there is relative parity in the league. In college football, there is a massive gap between the haves and have-nots, and losses have to be analyzed.
Should head-to-head games matter?
Absolutely. However, the goal of the CFP is to put the best teams that are playing the best at the end of the year into the playoffs. Losses in Week 1 are only relevant if the team doesn’t change or improve. In the case of Notre Dame, they have improved immensely since the opening game of the year.
ESPN’s Football Power Index (FPI), which serves as a “measure of team strength that is meant to be the best predictor of a team’s performance going forward for the rest of the season,” shows how things have changed for Miami and Notre Dame since the opening week of the season.
In the current ESPN FPI rankings, Notre Dame is third, and Miami is eighth.
What does that mean?
It means that, despite the Week 1 loss, the data shows Notre Dame is a significantly better football team than Miami and would likely be favored to win if the two played this weekend.
Head-to-head matters, but only when the two teams are viewed as equal. There’s a reason the CFP committee doesn’t even put out its first rankings until several weeks into the year: teams change and evolve. The committee’s focus is on getting the best teams at the end of the year, not the beginning.
Notre Dame has become an infinitely better team since Week 1. Miami? Not so much.
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