College Football Playoff era proves end of era for Group of Five
GRAPEVINE, Texas — In hindsight, the 2011 season stands as the defining year in the Southeastern Conference’s dynastic reign over college football: Alabama and LSU met once in the regular season and again in the title game, with the Crimson Tide pulling in the league’s sixth of seven national championships in a row.
It might also stand as the last great moment for those leagues once labeled as non-BCS — outside the Bowl Championship Series automatic structure — and now known as the Group of Five: the American Athletic Conference, Conference USA, Mid-American Conference, Mountain West Conference and Sun Belt Conference.
In a mock College Football Playoff selection committee based on the 2011 season attended by USA TODAY Sports, two programs then in Group of Five leagues reached New Year’s Six bowls. Ten-win TCU, which won the Mountain West, was pitted against Clemson in the Peach Bowl. Eleven-win Boise State, the Mountain West runner-up, was matched with Stanford in the Fiesta Bowl.
Another three Group of Five teams sat inside the mock committee’s top 25: No. 20 Southern Mississippi, No. 21 Houston and No. 25 Northern Illinois.
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It was a different time for non-major programs, which flourished during a brief period of the BCS — from 2004-11 — but whose makeup has been diminished by conference realignment. Of the programs that defined this era, only Boise State remains in the Group of Five; TCU has gone to the Big 12 Conference, Utah to the Pac-12 Conference and Brigham Young to independent status, robbing the Group of Five of three standard-bearers.
The gap between the Power Five and the Group of Five has widened considerably in the year since, even as a few teams from the latter have stepped off impressively during the first month-plus of the 2015 season.
The American houses four undefeated teams: Houston, Memphis, Navy and Temple. Toledo is unbeaten, with a notable win against Arkansas. Boise State has wins against Washington and Virginia, but a road loss to BYU. Yet as the American heads into the heart of league play — and all four teams seem destined for at least one loss — the likelihood of more than one Group of Five team reaching a Playoff access bowl grows more and more unlikely.
And that might be for the duration of the Playoff era. Consider last season, for example, when the final Playoff ranking featured just one Group of Five team, Boise State, in the top 25. Likewise with Amway Coaches Poll and Associated Press poll, which had the Broncos at No. 21 and six non-major programs receiving votes.
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Members of the selection committee “don’t really talk conferences,” said committee chairman Jeff Long, the athletics director at Arkansas. Yet several data points at the committee’s disposal don’t favor teams from the Group of Five level: records against Power Five teams, records against teams in the Playoff top 25 and “opponents’ record ratio,” the latter a formula found by combining an opponent’s record and the record of its own opponents.
Several times during the mock seeding process, records against winning teams — opponents with at least six wins — served as the tiebreaker between teams with comparable résumés; after three re-votes, this helped Wisconsin eventually move ahead of Oregon and into the fourth and final spot in the Playoff field.
As expected, quality of victory was another oft-cited tiebreaker. Houston won 12 games in 2011, the second-most of any team in the Football Bowl Subdivision, with its one loss coming in the Conference USA championship game. That did nothing to keep the Cougars from finishing at least 10 spots outside of contention for a New Year’s Six bowl.
“By our protocol, conference championships come into play when teams are comparable,” Long said.
In 2015, these Group of Five champions — let alone the solid second tier of teams that come up short — simply don’t match up with the Power Five. The race for the access bowl ensured the highest-ranked team from a the Group of Five landscape will be intense, with as many as five teams from three different leagues battling for the honor. In this new era, however, there will be only room for one.
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