Iowa Football: If playoff rankings only reflected resume through Week 9
By Matt Opad
Nine weeks into the season, it is now possible to use on-field performance to determine CFB playoff rankings. Here’s where the Iowa football team stands.
The first iteration of the actual college football playoff rankings are coming out November 5th, but oftentimes, biases do enter the rankings. Here’s what the rankings would reflect (and subsequently where the Iowa football team would be) if we just used the on-field performance.
I have taken it upon myself to rank teams only based on who they’ve beaten (and the amount of wins the opponent has), whether they did it on the road, and if the team they beat belongs to a Power 5 conference. FCS wins do not count as wins, though losing to an FCS is heavily penalized.
To ease any confusion, teams that are 8-0, but have a win against an FCS, will appear 7-0 on these rankings. The hope for the playoff committee was that the rankings would encourage better, more interesting games. While those rankings haven’t provided that result, these rankings will take that objective into account.
Additionally, bad losses are penalized, though not to the same extent that good wins are rewarded.
Average margin of victory is also a small factor in this ranking. This really only acts as a tiebreaker for teams with similar records.
The intent is to create a system that only looks at the resume. With that in mind, here are the rankings, based solely on the resume.