With one week remaining, Baylor-TCU debate still hot for playoff
Everything about TCU and Baylor is up for scrutiny, starting with the College Football Playoff committee's reverence for strength-of-schedule, to Baylor fans' pulpit-pounding for head-to-head to serve as a no-brainer.
Another wild Saturday of college football closed November little more clarity to what will eventually be the final four teams when the committee releases its final poll on the first Sunday of December.
About all that's certain is that this raging TCU-Baylor battlefield is about to explode.
First, here's what we should expect Tuesday when the committee releases its penultimate poll: Alabama and Oregon will stay in the top two. Florida State will remain glued at No. 3. TCU, riding its Texas Thanksgiving thrashing will claim No. 4 for a second time. Ohio State, surging late past Michigan, will slide closely in at No. 5 (although it will be interesting to see if the committee downgrades the Buckeyes after the season-ending injury to quarterback J.T. Barrett). And Baylor, after nearly spitting the bit against Texas Tech, will stay very much alive at No. 6.
And so as we debate point-differentials against TCU and Baylor's common opponents like West Virginia (Baylor's lone loss), Oklahoma, Texas and Tech Tech, and search for any smidgeon of separation between the two 10-1 conference co-leaders (along with Kansas State), we now get to compare a new category: Each's worst win.
The Bears stunningly now have their very own Kansas. And truth be told, Baylor's 48-46 heart attack at Jerry World could be judged by the committee more harshly than TCU's 34-30 squeaker two weeks ago at bitter-cold Kansas. That near-loss dropped the Frogs from No. 4 to No. 5.
Baylor won't have to worry about falling a peg thanks to No. 8 UCLA getting shellacked by Stanford and Georgia Tech whacking No. 9 Georgia.
"I'm not sure if it was a game or a war, quite honestly," Baylor coach Art Briles said afterward. "A desperate man is a dangerous man, and we were dealing with a desperate man. ... We got a big win on a big stage. And we set ourselves up to have a chance next weekend to do something pretty special."
The Big 12 will crown a set of co-champs next weekend and it is positioned to then get one team in the playoff when two believe they deserve it outright.
And that's where the committee has backed itself into a corner.
Gary Patterson's Frogs will end their season with a presumed ho-hummer at home against Iowa State. But an hour south in Waco, the Bears get No. 12 Kansas State, a dangerous team TCU has already handled, and one that would love to prevent the Bears from a first-ever repeat.
If K-State pulls the upset, it and TCU will share the conference title and the Frogs' playoff competition (at least from within the Big 12) suddenly vanishes. Meanwhile, wounded Ohio State will go into the Big Ten title game leaning on the season's third quarterback.
However, if Baylor wins, the committee hops into one very hot seat. Baylor and TCU would be named co-conference champs, but the conference will not break the tie. They'll leave the dirty work of picking the one true playoff qualifier to the 12-member committee.
One line of thinking is that the committee will view a Baylor win over K-State as at long last aligning the Bears' overall strength-of schedule closer to that of TCU. That would allow the committee to then use the Oct. 11 head-to-head matchup as the ultimate differentiator. The Bears turned a 21-point fourth-quarter deficit into a thrilling 61-58 win.
Yet after five CFP rankings, the committee has not found that victory as reason for Baylor to outrank TCU. The committee has favored TCU from the beginning, initially ranking it No. 7 and Baylor No. 13.
It does then seem a bit odd, if not illogical, that a Baylor home win over Kansas State suddenly changes the equation enough for the Bears to leap the Frogs. After all, the message received by its rankings is that TCU's non-conference scheduling of Minnesota wins out over Baylor's scheduling of FCS school Northwestern State.
Enter the other side of the committee's conundrum. If all along the committee had internally decided to bump Baylor ahead of TCU following a K-State victory, why didn't the committee simply rank the Bears ahead of TCU in the first place? Because Baylor beat TCU, ranking it higher likely wouldn't have caused a ripple of negativity from the media or college football fandom.
Ranking Baylor higher from the beginning also would have forced Baylor to lose its way out of the higher ranking rather than the very real potential of punishing the Frogs for winning out.
"Like I told my team, let's take care of what we can take care of and let somebody else make that decision," Patterson said before playing Texas. "Let's not make that decision for them. Go to 11-1, and then they got to make the decision. We're trying to play well enough to where we can win by one point and get to where we need to go."
