ESPN is phasing BYU football out of the playoff conversation, and it has to stop

The final College Football Playoff Rankings of the regular season have been released, and once again, the 11-1 BYU Cougars find themselves on the outside looking in, one spot shy of the top-10 at-large cut-off, thanks to a lack of quality candidates in the ACC and Group of 5.

BYU approaches the Big 12 Conference Championship game in Arlington against the 4th-ranked Texas Tech Red Raiders, and will receive an automatic bid if they can find a way to upset the juggernaut from Lubbock. After losing 29-7 earlier in the year (the Cougars' only loss of 2025), taking down Texas Tech will be a very tall order.

But here's the problem: BYU shouldn't have to be fighting for their life this weekend, because they already have one of the strongest resumes in all of college football.

BYU Cougars College Football Playoff Resume

BYU has only one loss this season, a road game against the current 4th-ranked team in the most recent rankings. The only comparable losses among Playoff competitors belong to 5 Oregon (a 10-point home loss to 2 Indiana), 7 Ole Miss (ran into 3 Georgia), 10 Notre Dame (losses to Miami and Texas A&M), and 9 Alabama (a 2-point loss to 8 Oklahoma).

BYU's best win of the year is against now 15th-ranked Utah (they've slid three spots in the past two weeks despite standing 10-2). They are 2-1 against currently-ranked teams with a road win at 18 Arizona and the aforementioned loss to 4 Texas Tech.

BYU has the most wins over bowl-eligible teams in the country, with six, and a Strength of Record rating of 7, which is higher than Ole Miss, Alabama, Miami, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Vanderbilt, and Texas. BYU has beaten six teams with seven wins or more this season, and is 22-3 over the past two seasons.

In the College Football Playoff era, no Power Four team with an 11-1 record has ever been ranked outside the top 10, until BYU. In fact, no Power Four team with just one loss at the end of the season has ever been ranked lower than 10... until BYU, who has sat at 11 for the past three weeks.

11 feels deliberate by the Playoff selection committee, being the highest that BYU, a one-loss representative from the Big 12 Conference, can be slotted without being heir to an at-large bid. Joel Klatt gave up the narrative when he placed BYU 11th in his rankings, citing the fact that BYU will play in the Big 12 Championship as the reason they don't deserve to be in the top 10 (which is madness). Kirk Herbstreit further spilled the beans when he outright stated: The Playoff committee does not want BYU to beat Texas Tech this weekend.

Why would the College Football Playoff be worse for more non-SEC, non-Big Ten representation? What's so wrong with an 11-win BYU football team (their second consecutive 11-win season) competing with 10-win Notre Dame

Now, after the reveal of the current batch of rankings, ESPN is pulling the same dishonest and misleading stunt: leaving BYU off the resume comparison screen for no apparent reason. Notice how teams number 9, 10, and 12 are present in the discussion, while 11th-ranked BYU is blatantly ignored -- relegated to a parenthetical footnote at the top.

The method to exclude the Cougs is simple: keep them out of the spotlight. Keep their resume out of the comparison graphic. Keep BYU irrelevant, because a Playoff without two Big 12 teams is better for revenue and ratings.

When ESPN does include BYU in Playoff conversations, they have used misleading -- and at times blatantly false -- statistics to either drag the Cougars down or boost their adversaries.

Using stats from when the teams played, rather than how the current picture is presented takes every matchup severely out of context and only serves to increase the luster of the SEC. You can wipe three of Oklahoma's ranked wins off the graphic, as Auburn, Missouri, and Tennessee are no longer ranked in the CFP Poll. Similarly, two of Alabama's ranked wins are no longer in the top 25. BYU, meanwhile, has added another ranked win as their road victory against Arizona looks stronger by the week, as the Wildcats have climbed to the 18th spot since losing to BYU.

That's right, the graphic should read 2-1, 2-1, 2-1, but instead reads 5-1, 4-1, and 1-1. Guess which team gets the short end of the stick here?

Alabama beat 5-7 Auburn by 7 points, and their reward was a bump above Notre Dame, rising from 10th to 9th. BYU's best win of the season, Utah, dropped two spots in this round of rankings after beating 5-7 Kansas by double-digits on the road. BYU's resume takes damage for no apparent reason, while Alabama is vaunted for doing less.

BYU likewise took down a 5-7 foe on Saturday by 20 points, but that kind of victory doesn't move the needle from Provo.

I know that I sound paranoid -- obsessed -- with the current state of the college football world. I just can't believe the media push to either ignore BYU or mislead viewers to exclude the Cougars from serious contention.

Do a blind resume test. Compare best wins and worst losses, and BYU will stand among the likes of Oregon and Ole Miss without fail. Neither of those teams will compete for their conference championships, despite holding just one loss on the year. Yet BYU, whose only crime was a road loss to a team with a first-round bye in the current bracket, has to wait in line behind Notre Dame, who has no marquee wins greater than BYU, and two losses to inferior teams to the one that beat BYU. Alabama lost to a putrid Florida State team, yet was promoted in this week's edition.

I'm done asking the powers that be to make this make sense; it will never make sense, and this is by design.

Money rules the sport of college football. The College Football Playoff was a move toward equality and equity in a sport so dominated by the biggest names. But the will of the selection committee is such that the teams that carry the best payouts will carry the greatest odds to play in the final game. What a shame that a team's merit yields far less than a team's brand.