Kiffin: Schedule strength doesn’t help CFP spot, but ‘helps get you fired’
Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin hasn’t seen evidence that a more difficult strength of schedule helps improve teams’ rankings in the College Football Playoff standings.
But Kiffin said on the SEC coaches teleconference Wednesday that playing a more difficult schedule does threaten coaches’ job security.
“(It) hasn’t proved to really help you in the rankings,” Kiffin said of having a more difficult strength of schedule. “But what it will do is get you fired, because of five of the top 10 strength of schedules — there are people that wanted these really hard schedules, and they’re going to get harder with nine (SEC) games — five of those 10 have fired their head coach.
“So I guess that doesn’t help you in the rankings, but it helps you get fired. There’s facts.”
To Kiffin’s point, there have been coach firings at Florida, which has the No. 1 strength of schedule, along with LSU (third-strongest schedule), Auburn (fifth), Arkansas (seventh) and Penn State (10th).
Kiffin was among the SEC coaches who spoke up with concerns when the league was considering adding a ninth conference game beginning next season, a move it ultimately decided to make in August.
Kiffin’s Ole Miss team beat The Citadel 49-0 on Saturday, but it fell behind Big 12 leader Texas Tech in the CFP rankings after the Red Raiders beat previously unbeaten top 10-ranked BYU 29-7.
The Rebels have a schedule strength that ranks 32nd in the country, while the Texas Tech schedule strength ranks 47th.
Ole Miss’ only defeat came on the road at Georgia 43-35, while the Red Raiders’ only loss came on the road against Arizona State 26-22.
CFP chairman Mack Rhoades admitted there was a great deal of discussion in the committee before ranking Texas Tech ahead of Ole Miss.
“The longest discussion that we had in the room was Texas Tech and Ole Miss,” Rhoades said on the CFP teleconference Tuesday. “Texas Tech’s win this past weekend against BYU was really convincing on both sides of the ball.
“We really looked at Texas Tech’s two top-13 wins, BYU and Utah. Ole Miss had the really good win at Oklahoma and also a win against LSU, but Texas Tech is highly regarded by the committee.”
Kiffin was among the coaches who noted last season that schedule strength was not weighed as heavily as the CFP indicated it would be, resulting in three 3-loss SEC teams not making the 12-team field — Ole Miss among them.
Rhoades reflected last week that a new schedule-related metric had been introduced, and that there has been a “tweak” to the previous schedule strength.
“We introduced the new metric, which is record strength, which measures how well a team performs against its schedule,” Rhoades said last week, “and that’s a cumulative sum of scores as we progress through the year.
“And then we took schedule strength and we tweaked it. … We put more weight on the stronger teams, and so that was the adjustment for schedule strength.”
There were occasions last season when a higher-ranked team played a weaker opponent but maintained its ranking because, as former CFP chairman Warde Manuel said, “All they can do is play who is in front of them.”
About the Author
Mike is in his eighth season covering SEC and Georgia athletics for AJC-DawgNation and has 30 years of collegiate sports multimedia experience, 25 of them in the SEC including beat writer stops at Auburn, Alabama, Tennessee and now Georgia. Mike was named the National FWAA Beat Writer of the Year in January, 2018.
