UCLA Is 9-0 and Ranked Eighth: The College Football Playoff Committee's Undefeated Problem

UCLA beat Minnesota 34-20 on Saturday, and the Bruins are 9-0 for the first time since 1998. They are the Big Ten's only undefeated team, 6-0 in conference play, and winners of every game they have played this season. The College Football Playoff selection committee looked at all of that on Tuesday and ranked them eighth, behind six teams that have already lost, including two that have lost twice. On national television after Saturday's win, FOX analyst Joel Klatt called the committee's stance absurd, and he is not the only one struggling to square the record with the ranking.

The committee has a case, and it is worth stating fairly before dismissing it. UCLA's first eight opponents had a combined record of 27-39, and only Oregon and Wisconsin among them held winning records. The Bruins have beaten nobody the committee considers elite, and in a sport where the ranking is supposed to measure who would beat whom rather than who has avoided losing, a soft schedule is a real discount. The committee chair, Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek, has said to expect significant movement in the rankings over the coming weeks, which is another way of saying the first list is a sketch, not a sentence.

But there is a difference between a soft schedule and a fake record, and UCLA's win on Saturday made that difference harder to ignore. Starting in place of the injured Nico Iamaleava, backup quarterback Ty Dieffenbach completed only eight passes, yet those eight went for a career-high 303 yards and three touchdowns. The Bruins finished with 466 total yards, about 8.5 yards per play, and held Minnesota to 296. A team that wins by two touchdowns on the road with its backup quarterback is not a team that has merely been lucky for nine weeks. The committee's doubt is really a bet that UCLA's schedule has hidden its flaws, and the next three weeks are when that bet gets tested in the open.

The remaining schedule is the whole argument now. UCLA hosts Illinois at the Rose Bowl on November 13, travels to Michigan on November 21, and closes the regular season against USC on November 28. Win all three and the debate ends: a 12-0 Big Ten team, quite possibly playing for the conference title, does not get left out of a 12-team field that reserves five places for conference champions and seven at-large spots. Lose once and the Bruins are still very likely in, because an 11-1 Power Four team with a conference-title game on its resume has room in a field this wide. Lose twice and the committee's skepticism becomes the story of the season.

That is why I expect UCLA to be in the bracket when the final rankings are announced on Selection Day, Sunday, December 6. The committee's eighth-place ranking is a hedge against a schedule it does not yet trust, and hedges like that dissolve as other teams lose. Miami, Georgia, Utah and Indiana sit above the Bruins today, and at least one of them will stumble before December. What the committee cannot do is keep an undefeated Big Ten team out while handing at-large places to two-loss teams, not without admitting the ranking measures reputation rather than results. UCLA still has to earn it on the field, against Michigan and USC most of all. But nine wins without a loss is not a scheduling accident. It is the one thing in this sport that cannot be argued with, and by December 6, I expect the committee to stop trying.