The first College Football Playoff rankings didn’t do Kentucky any favors, at least not if you’re judging teams by what they’ve actually done on the field.
The Wildcats came in at No. 6, behind Georgia, Alabama, Utah and Indiana, with No. 1 Miami out front.
But in a true resume-based look at the season entering Week 10, Kentucky owns the strongest body of work. That’s the disconnect: the committee leaned on reputation, prediction and logos, while Kentucky’s actual results stack up better than several teams above it.
Start with the wins. Kentucky has two victories over CFP Top 25 teams, LSU and South Carolina, but that still undersells what the Wildcats have done away from home. Their road wins at Texas A&M and Oklahoma have been treated like background noise, even though both opponents sit inside the top 30 of the CFB Metrics Consensus, which combines 10 respected power rankings into one 1-138 list.
If you want to narrow it to the highest-end wins, Kentucky still has the edge. By ESPN’s FPI, the Wildcats own a better win than Georgia or Alabama, thanks to the victory over FPI No.
5 LSU. Kentucky also has three road wins over top-30 power-rated teams.
Georgia, which landed four spots ahead of Kentucky at No. 2, has one fewer win against top-30 opposition, and its only loss at home to Auburn is worse than Kentucky’s lone defeat at home to Alabama.
Utah’s placement at No. 3 is even harder to square with a resume-first approach. The 8-0 Utes have played just one team ranked in the top 50 of the CFB Metrics Consensus, and that came in a home win over No.
22 Houston. Kentucky, by contrast, has four wins against top-50 opposition.
Putting Utah ahead of the Wildcats only makes sense if predictive metrics are carrying too much weight.
Indiana draws the same criticism. The Hoosiers don’t come close to matching Kentucky’s resume strength, even if Kentucky is only 26th in ESPN’s FPI.
That’s the tension here: predictive numbers have their place, but they should be secondary when the resumes aren’t close. Kentucky’s isn’t close to the teams above it.
The committee may eventually get the rankings it seems to want. Kentucky is a 6.5-point underdog at Tennessee this week, so a loss there would give the selection committee the kind of on-field result it appears to be waiting for. If that happens, the current order will look easier to justify.
But right now, it doesn’t. Even if Alabama gets the nod over Kentucky because of the head-to-head result, and Georgia goes ahead of Alabama for the same reason, that still doesn’t explain why Kentucky sits behind Utah and Indiana. The bigger issue is that the committee seems to be forecasting what teams might become instead of rewarding what they’ve already accomplished.
That’s where a resume metric comes in. Using a system modeled after college basketball’s Wins Above Bubble, each win and loss is assigned a value based on how likely the average top-25 team would be to win or lose that game, factoring in opponent strength from the CFB Metrics Consensus and game location. The final total shows how many more or fewer wins a team has than the average No. 25 team would have against the same schedule.
It’s not meant to be the only answer. But it should be a major guide.
Wins, losses and locations tell the story. And on that front, Kentucky belongs higher than Utah and Indiana.
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Even with the offense rolling, coach Darian DeVries spent part of the night pointing to defensive lapses that still need cleaning up before the schedule stiffens. Indiana has enough depth to keep experimenting with lineups and roles, but next week will offer a better test of whether this new-look rotation can hold up when the margin for error gets smaller. [Read more 🡒]