CFP selection committee makes change to strength-of-schedule metric for 2025
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The College Football Playoff selection committee has made a significant change to its rankings process.
The committee announced on Wednesday it has adjusted its strength-of-schedule metric for the 2025 season to add “greater weight” for games against strong opponents. The committee is also introducing a “record strength” metric to help asses how a team performed against their schedule.
Here’s an excerpt of the release from the CFP:
Changes for the upcoming season include enhancements to the tools that the selection committee uses to assess schedule strength and how teams perform against their schedule. The current schedule strength metric has been adjusted to apply greater weight to games against strong opponents. An additional metric, record strength, has been added to the selection committee’s analysis to go beyond a team’s schedule strength to assess how a team performed against that schedule. This metric rewards teams defeating high-quality opponents while minimizing the penalty for losing to such a team. Conversely, these changes will provide minimal reward for defeating a lower-quality opponent while imposing a greater penalty for losing to such a team.
This change to the system comes less than a year after 11-1 Indiana and 11-2 SMU both made the College Football Playoff as at-large selections over multiple 9-3 programs in the SEC. Key figures such as SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne have been strong proponents of factoring strength-of-schedule more heavily into CFP rankings.
It’s unclear at this time how much of an impact these new metrics will have on the CFP selection process in 2025 and beyond. However, the SEC — which has the strongest league by a wide margin according to SP+ — could certainly end up benefitting from a system where strength of schedule is more heavily-weighted.
In 2024, the SEC settled for just 3 College Football Playoff teams — Texas, Georgia and Tennessee — while a few others such as Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina just missed the cut.
Spenser is a news editor for Saturday Down South and covers college football across all Saturday Football brands.
