The latest College Football Playoff ranking has one glaring mistake
The college football season has a long ways to go, but if the season were to end today, the College Football Playoff committee's top-4 teams has one glaring mistake, Notre Dame is in and Baylor is not.
The committee has released their second playoff ranking and the big change this week is that 1-loss Notre Dame has moved up and replaced Louisiana State in the Top-4. Meanwhile, undefeated Baylor remains sixth.
Notre Dame's Resume
Notre Dame pushed their way into title contention in the eyes of the public with a convincing win over Georgia Tech. At the time, Tech was ranked No. 14 and a lot of people thought the Fighting Irish would have a difficult time stopping Georgia Tech's rushing attack.
But since that drubbing at the hands of Notre Dame - that was a 30-7 game before Tech scored two late touchdowns - Georgia Tech has lost five of their last six games and the only win came via a last-second blocked field goal return for a touchdown against Florida State.
In other words, Georgia Tech just isn't that good and Notre Dame's win was not as impressive as we thought.
Notre Dame's best wins after Georgia Tech are against Temple and Navy, two teams from the American Conference. Maybe the committee looked at those two wins and see that the teams are are 8-1 and 7-1, respectively, but you can't ignore that those teams are doing that against a much weaker American Conference schedule.
That means Notre Dame's most impressive game is actually a loss, their 24-22 loss to top-ranked Clemson. While an impressive showing, it is still a loss.
Baylor's Resume
Meanwhile, Baylor is undefeated and they are steamrolling the opposition, winning their games by an average score of 57-25.
While Baylor does not yet have a signature win against a top opponent - or a signature loss - they are rolling through a Power-5 conference, not the American Conference.
Almost every major rating system says Baylor has been more impressive than Notre Dame up to this point.
ESPN's Football Power Index has Baylor as the second-best team in FBS (formerly Division I-A) and Notre Dame all the way down at No. 9.
Both Jeff Sagarin's ratings and the RPI ratings have Baylor as the fourth-best team in the country. Those same rating systems have Notre Dame outside the Top-4, at No. 5 and No. 7, respectively.
Why Notre Dame is in and Baylor is out
The committee is supposedly looking at what teams have done up to this point. But having Notre Dame ahead of Baylor suggests that the committee either values Notre Dame's loss more than all of Baylor's wins combined, or they are looking ahead and think Notre Dame has a better chance of running the table than Baylor.
In fact, the FPI gives Notre Dame a 37% chance to win their remaining regular season games while Baylor has just a 16% chance. But that says more about the difficulty of Baylor's schedule with three games against top-15 teams while Notre Dame has just one ranked opponent left, No. 8 Stanford.
If Baylor loses one of those games, fine, Notre Dame's loss will be better. But at this point Baylor is the better team and as long as they remain undefeated, one of the four playoff spots should be theirs.