Iowa Football: If Playoff Ranking reflected resume through Week 10

What the resume rankings mean for Iowa Football, Big Ten

Iowa football, unless improbable chaos ensues, is not making the College Football Playoff.

This isn’t intended to be overly negative, but with so many teams so far ahead of Iowa, it is virtually impossible for the Hawkeyes to have one of the four best resumes in college football.

With that said, Iowa still has three probable bowl teams on their schedule. There is room to pad the Hawkeyes’ resume.

The biggest problem and perhaps the sticking point of this series of articles is the fact that the resume rankings do not match up with the AP Poll. Like many would expect, teams like Alabama and Georgia are ranked much higher than what they’ve earned.

Alabama has won five of the last ten national championships, so I don’t think it is unfair to give the Tide the benefit of the doubt. Clemson has won two of the last three national championships and is not given the same benefit of the doubt.

What is perhaps more mind-boggling is that the success of Alabama has given the rest of the SEC more of a leash than teams in other conferences. Unfortunately for fans of other conferences, the SEC is the only conference with more than one team that has won a playoff game.

Overall, the exercise of looking into the strength of resumes has only shown mild and somewhat understandable bias towards a conference that has seen the most success in the four-team playoff.

Until a Big Ten team not named Ohio State wins a playoff game, fans of teams in Iowa football’s conference cannot expect to get the same benefit of the doubt that Alabama and Georgia receive.