cincydawg said:
If you win your conference with 0 or 1 loss, you almost certainly make the playoff.
If you don't win your conference, you're on very thin ice and I'd argue you should be left out barring unusual circumstances.
Absolutely. Of course every year has different circumstances, but us, Clem & Okl all got in with 1 loss by winning the conference. Had Ohio St simply beaten a 5-loss Iowa team, they'd have gotten in. By the same token, had Wisc beaten OSU in the B1G-C, they'd have gotten in. Since there were no other major conference 0 or 1 loss champions, that left the door open for Bama to get in as a 1 loss non-champion. Heck, if Southern Cal had just beaten Washington St, they probably would have gotten in at 12-1.
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Wisconsin does play 9 conference games with somewhat offsets their light OOC slate.
I'm not so sure here. Their conference slate was so weak last year. They were in the weaker B1G West, and they played the bottom two teams from the East plus Mich which made it 3 of the bottom 4. The only teams who were ranked at the time they played were Iowa and Michigan, both were at home, and both finished the season unranked with 5 losses. They played Northwestern who finished 17th, but was unranked at the time they played having just lost to Duke. All three of those games were at home. Had Georgia played that schedule, everyone across the country would be screaming about how easy our schedule was. It really was a cakewalk.