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Why Houston lost its chance at a College Football Playoff berth despite beating Cincinnati
There are four spots in the College Football Playoff and a team needs an incredible résumé to land one of those spots.
But for Houston to get one of those spots out of the American Athletic Conference, the Cougars' résumé needed to be impeccable.
Houston might have beaten Cincinnati 40-16 on Thursday night, thanks to 28 unanswered points in the fourth quarter, but even with the win, the Cougars do not control their own destiny to reach the CFP.
That's because Houston's résumé is no longer impeccable.
Any other team in the nation would be entitled to a rough game -- they’d be praised for figuring it out and winning a tough contest on the road. We’d talk about their tremendous defensive performance on Thursday night, not the early offensive struggles.
But Houston is not a normal team.
In the two years of the College Football Playoff, there never has been a non-Power 5 participant. Given the selection committee’s favoritism toward selecting conference champions, the fact that there’s at least one major conference champion who will miss out on the playoff every season, and Houston’s comparatively easy schedule, which shares a level of difficulty with that of Miami-Ohio and Rice, a shaky performance for three quarters isn’t good enough for Houston.
It might even be disqualifying.
No team’s résumé will be as scrutinized as Houston's -- when you’re trying to be the first to do something big, everything is deemed important.
That could seem unfair, but the selection process for the College Football Playoff is a subjective one, and Houston had no room for error this season -- and three so-so quarters, with all eyes on them, is considered an error.
Other teams might have their sluggish starts on the road on a Thursday night forgotten or overlooked because of their reputation, but Houston’s will have legs for the remainder of the season: For 50 minutes Thursday, they looked on par with Cincinnati, and the committee won’t forget that when it's trying to imagine how the Cougars would look against Alabama.
Houston still might be able to make the playoff, but winning out won’t be enough to sniff a CFP berth.
Perhaps any perception that Houston controlled its own fate was false -- an overreaction to the Cougars’ Week 1 win over Oklahoma -- but if it did indeed exist, it’s now gone.
Houston can blow out the remainder of the teams on its schedule, but it still will have to root for Cincinnati to be a dominant force down the stretch as well.
Then, on top of that, Houston will need one or two Power-5 conference champions to have two or three losses -- but for Oklahoma to win the Big 12 at 11-1.
Or, to put it more succinctly, even with 13 wins, Houston is going to need an unprecedented bit of chaos to reach the Playoff. Even in a sport as unpredictable as college football, if that's the case, it's easy to predict that Houston won’t be a member of the four-team party on New Year’s Eve.
