Texas ranked No. 11, yet outside the playoff bracket. Discover which teams the committee overlooked and why the Longhorns deserve a higher spot.
On Tuesday, the College Football Playoff Selection Committee delivered its first round of rankings along with a bracket that declared which teams would make the playoffs. The bracket included most of the teams you’d expect, like Ohio State and Texas A&M, who are both having spectacular seasons.
Despite coming in at No. 11 on the list, Texas was not included in the bracket. Instead, Virginia and Memphis, which were both ranked below Texas, made the cut due to their conference rankings. While Texas had a rocky start to the season, one could argue that it still deserves to be included in the bracket. But that begs the question: who would they replace?
For starters, the teams ranked one through seven all deserve a spot above Texas due to their records and strength of schedule. This brings us to Texas Tech, whose only loss this season came a few weeks ago against unranked Arizona State.
While you could argue that Texas Tech has had an easier schedule than Texas and doesn’t deserve to be ranked as high as they are, they’ve won a majority of their games in blowout fashion–not to mention the fact that Texas has one more loss, one of which came against an unranked team.
The same argument applies to Oregon, whose one loss came against No. 2 Indiana and, similar to Texas Tech, has won a majority of its games by multiple scores.
Obviously, Virginia and Memphis both deserve their spots due to leading their conferences, which brings us down to one last team: the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.
Notre Dame opened up its season with two straight losses to Miami and Texas A&M. Sure, you could argue that those are tough matchups and that Notre Dame deserves some credit for giving itself a challenge. To that, I respond: Did Texas not do the same thing? This is a team that opened its season in the hardest way imaginable–a road game against the defending national champions.
On top of that, Texas has far more valuable wins than Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish only have one ranked win on the season. Even then, it’s not a top-ten win, not even top-15, but a win against No. 20 USC at home.
Compare that to Texas’ two wins against top-ten teams in Oklahoma and Vanderbilt. Now, while I can grudgingly admit that the loss against Florida is rough and nearly inexcusable, the SEC is still the SEC, and a road loss to an unranked team isn’t unimaginable by any means. For those reasons, I’d have to say it should be the Longhorns as the last team in and the Fighting Irish as the last team out.
Regardless of what Texas fans may believe, the committee has the final say. And if the Longhorns want to change that narrative, they’ll have to earn it on the field. That starts with beating Georgia and will most likely end with beating Texas A&M.