Nick Saban says the College Football Playoff selection process is broken, and he wants strength of schedule to matter more than win totals.
Speaking on ESPN’s “College GameDay” on Saturday, the legendary head coach argued that the current system rewards teams simply for piling up wins, regardless of who they beat, while the committee’s actual criteria remain murky.
“Players love to play in big games. That’s what great competitors love to do. Fans love to see big games,” Saban said. “I think what we’ve created now is a system of how many games you win helps you get into playoffs, and the playoffs become the barometer for the success of your program. We need a better metric to actually evaluate quality wins and quality losses. Some losses are better than some wins.”
His comments came after a Week 2 slate that showed exactly what he’s talking about. Oregon lost on the road to Oklahoma State. Michigan, unranked after an unimpressive win over Western Michigan, beat No. 11 Oklahoma. Texas rallied from a 45-minute deficit to beat Ohio State at home in the marquee matchup of the week. Texas Tech needed a late fourth-quarter push to escape Oregon State.
Those games delivered the kind of stakes fans want: name programs, hostile environments, and results that actually meant something. Saban’s point is that the expanded playoff format is making those games rarer, not more common, because coaches have little incentive to schedule tough opponents when the committee’s standards keep shifting.
The idea has traction, especially among supporters of the SEC’s move to a nine-game conference schedule, which will add roughly eight more losses across the league each year. The logic is straightforward: Ohio State shouldn’t be punished heavily for losing to Texas, and that loss should count for more than a win over Youngstown State would.
But leaning harder into schedule strength risks reviving the same complaints that sank the old BCS system, which relied on human judgment and drew constant criticism for its bias. Computer-driven efficiency models cut down on some of that bias, but they don’t eliminate it entirely, and blending strength-of-resume metrics with efficiency rankings wouldn’t necessarily produce the results fans expect.
Alabama’s 2025 season makes the point. The Crimson Tide weren’t penalized for a blowout loss to Georgia in the SEC Championship Game, even though their full body of work suggested they should have been. After that loss, Alabama ranked 20th in SP+, an efficiency metric that measures performance rather than outcomes, and 19th in strength of resume. By that standard, they weren’t a playoff-caliber team.
The Texas-Ohio State result cuts the same way. By postgame win expectancy, the game was essentially a coin flip — Texas held a 50.2% win expectancy with an adjusted scoring margin of 0.0. Yet Ohio State still ranks second in SP+ to Texas’s sixth, even after the loss. If human polls rank Ohio State ahead of Texas anyway, plenty of fans, and possibly Saban himself, would object.
That’s the core problem with schedule-driven rankings: schedules themselves are judged subjectively, and what counts as a quality win or loss depends on perception as much as performance. In the era of unrestricted transfers and name, image and likeness deals, rosters can change dramatically from one year to the next, making brand-name reputation an increasingly unreliable guide. Texas Tech’s turnaround from where the program stood in 2023 and 2024 is a case in point.
A bigger playoff field could ease some of this by making teams less afraid to schedule tough opponents, since one loss wouldn’t be fatal. But few in the sport are pushing for a 24-team bracket, and it’s unclear how that would change the calculus.
Saban also made a point that drew no pushback at all.
“And it makes you better as a player. Great competition makes you better,” he said.
