Texas A&M Football: Aggies suffer from CFP Rankings’ inconsistencies

The Texas A&M football team was ranked 14th in the College Football Playoff rankings. With two losses on the year, this shouldn’t be a huge surprise. In fact, when it was announced, this was arguably the least surprising outcome imaginable.

That said, the real surprise came a few minutes later when the top-6 was announced.

Specifically, there was a very unpleasant surprise for virtually everybody in college football when the nation’s No. 2 team was announced by the committee. That team was Alabama.

The Texas A&M football team’s positioning in the CFP Rankings seems like an injustice based on Alabama’s positioning

When you’re creating a concrete set of rankings, there should be some consistency to go along with it. The AP Poll gets away with a lack of consistency because there are over 50 voters, so the top-25 will have less logic.

The College Football Playoff rankings should have consistency — they created the rankings to show their hierarchy in college football. The rankings hold no value if there isn’t any consistency from one through 25. This leads me to the primary question I’ll ask in this article.

How can you rank the Texas A&M football team lower than they were positioned in the AP Poll if you have Alabama as your second-best team?

Logically speaking, Texas A&M would move up in the rankings based on Alabama’s positioning. That was not the case.

You can say what you want about the committee’s process, but this proves one thing to me — they have no idea why the Aggies struggled early in the year. Granted, they have a lot of research to do, but they didn’t do that research for the Aggies. They see a couple of bad offensive performances and assume that the wins are the flukes, not vice versa.

With an already-bad taste in Aggie fans’ mouths after being snubbed last year, Aggie fans can only be disappointed with these rankings.

According to these rankings, Texas A&M has the best win in college football — that’s undeniable. They beat the highest-ranked one-loss team, giving them the best win in the game. They are one of two teams that have proven that they can beat a top-four team.

Again, if you’ve done your research, you’re aware that the team who beat Alabama is not the same team that struggled in its prior two games. Clearly, this went over the committee’s head.

I ask this question — how can you rank Auburn higher than A&M? The only rational answer here is to say that Auburn’s losses are not as bad, but are their wins as good? This isn’t a rhetorical question; the answer is no.

College Football Playoff teams will not be playing Mississippi State and Arkansas in the four-team playoff, so how can those losses weigh more heavily than their win over a CFP team? We saw Auburn play a top-four team and get destroyed. Why would they be in a better position to defeat that team down the road?

Texas A&M has been snubbed once again, but they have the power to prove that they should be ranked higher over the next few weeks.