There was no way that Alabama wasn’t going to fall in Tuesday night’s College Football Playoff Rankings after suffering its second loss of the season, falling to Oklahoma 23-21 at Bryant-Denny Stadium. But how far the Crimson Tide dropped came as a bit of a surprise.
The team with four wins over teams currently ranking the committee’s top 25, including a road win over the committee’s No. 4 team, dropped from No. 4 to No. 10, sliding behind two-loss Oklahoma and two-loss Notre Dame.
Head-to-head isn’t everything, or Alabama would be ahead of Georgia, and Florida State would be ahead of them both. However, it’s understandable that Alabama would slide behind the team that just beat them on their home field, despite outgaining that team 406 to 212 and dominating every aspect except the turnover battle.
Falling behind Notre Dame, though, which has one win over a team in the CFP committee’s current top 25 (No. 15 USC) and lost its other two big games of the season to Texas A&M and Miami, is questionable at best, absurd at worst. Still, it isn’t quite as absurd as the explanation newly appointed CFP committee chair Hunter Yurachek gave as to why the Tide fell so far.
Hunter Yurachek calls out Alabama’s run-game in bizarre rankings explanation
Yurachek, Arkansas’s athletic director, twice cited Alabama’s rushing yardage as a significant part of their evaluation of the team. "Florida State was up in that game 24-7, and they held Alabama to less than 100 yards rushing in that. Really, that was a sign of some of the struggles Alabama was going to have rushing the ball."
You go back and look at Alabama’s game at South Carolina, where they scored two touchdowns late to win that game. The next game against LSU, where they won both of those, but didn’t rush the ball for 100 yards. Again, against Oklahoma, was not able to move the ball on the ground."
The lack of a run game is a problem for Alabama; frankly, it’s surprising that the committee even watched the games enough to know that. However, for that specifically to be weighed heavily on their evaluation when Alabama won most of those games is baffling. Since when is rushing yards a metric for the committee?
I thought the CFP committee was breaking out a new advanced strength of record metric this season, but instead it bought the members “run the damn ball” hats and threw football back to the ‘90s.
If we’re dinging Alabama for not running the ball well, should we not penalize Oklahoma for averaging 4.2 yards per play against the Tide, or for having the 86th-ranked rushing offense in the country? What about for finishing Saturday’s game with a 4.8 percent postgame win expectancy according to Bill Connelly’s SP+?
The committee likes to cosplay as football analysts, but anyone who watched that game on Saturday saw that Alabama was the better team. Oklahoma deserves credit for forcing timely turnovers and holding on for the win, but the punishment of Alabama was far too severe, especially in favor of a Notre Dame team that has spent the last two months beating up on last-place teams in the Big Ten and SEC with an occasional Group of Six opponent mixed in.
Why would a lack of a run game even be considered by the committee if you’re winning despite it? If it were such a problem, then Alabama wouldn’t have beaten Georgia, Vanderbilt, Missouri, and Tennessee, in succession, arguably the most impressive collection of wins of any team in the entire country.