A 2014-2018 history of Power 5 conferences missing the Playoff, now including the Pac-12 again

Now that we have enough of a College Football Playoff sample size, we know that unless a 2007-style year or some other chaos comes around, nobody will make the field with more than one loss. The committee’s twice now picked one-loss non-champs over two-loss conference champs.

So if the two-loss benchmark is typically* the clearest example of when a team plays itself out of the Playoff discussion, we can use that to show when an entire conference has played its way out of that picture.

* Yes, 2017 Auburn, you were almost an exception.

Here’s when it’s happened during each season so far.

The Big 12 got left out in what we will always remember as the One True Champion year. The league technically didn’t really play itself out of the Playoff hunt at all, because TCU and Baylor ended up as co-champions with only one regular season loss each.

One semi-problem, at least PR-wise, was that the Big 12’s quest for One True Champion led to it having zero champions.

But more importantly than where the Big 12’s banner went, Ohio State played 13 games, and the 13th was an annihilation of Wisconsin.

Oklahoma’s gone on to make the Playoff twice since then, once without a championship game and once after the 12 brought the game back in 2017. In the first case, the lack of a title game actually helped the Sooners.

Stanford’s a notoriously slow-starting outfit, and it really came back to bite ‘em in 2015. If an ugly Week 1 loss to Northwestern by 10 points hadn’t happened (the infamous “body clocks” game), the Cardinal would have had a pretty convincing argument over one-loss Oklahoma, due to a win in the Pac-12’s 13th game, which the Big 12 still lacked.

Instead, Stanford lost by two to Oregon in mid-November.

On the same day, Utah also lost. The Utes were No. 10 in the Playoff rankings with plenty of time left to rise. They lost to Arizona on the road in double overtime, then clunked down the stretch and didn’t even end up winning the South.

Oklahoma lost in Week 1 to the AAC’s Houston. Then the Sooners also lost a controversy-twinged blowout to Ohio State in Week 3, eliminating themselves from the race. But the Sooners would end up playing spoiler for the whole league when they opened up a can on West Virginia late in the season, 56-28 in Morgantown. That gave the last Big 12 team its second loss.

If the Sooners couldn’t make the Playoff — they remain the only Big 12 team to ever do so — then they won’t let anybody else do it, either.

USC had all the momentum coming in after an electric Rose Bowl win to end 2016. The Trojans looked like they were still the league’s best hope for a Playoff berth, despite a close, weird, injury-plagued loss at Washington State in late September, the kind the committee can talk itself into forgiving. Then they got destroyed by Notre Dame.

The Cougars would lose their second game the next week to end their faint Playoff hopes, and then two weeks later, Washington would bite the dust against Stanford. In some great scheduling work, all of those teams had one of their losses come on Friday nights.

The Big Ten had its most talented team eat its second loss in Week 9, when Ohio State gave up 55 points to Iowa. Its last-ish chance was Wisconsin, which was undefeated headed into the Big Ten title game. Then UW lost to Ohio State, and the Big Ten was out, with Alabama edging the two-loss Buckeyes for the fourth spot.

Somehow, some way, Washington State was the last Pac 12 team standing for a month. But the Cougars lost to rival Washington in the Apple Cup on Black Friday to drop out.

There’s a solid chance the Big 12 also misses out, by way of Notre Dame going unbeaten and taking a bid from potential one-loss league champ Oklahoma.

Eliminated before the season, by default, until the Playoff committee indicates otherwise.

Houston might have gotten consideration in 2016, but we’ll never know, because the Cougars followed that Week 1 win against Oklahoma by losing twice before the first Playoff rankings came out. Just one loss would certainly eliminate any Group of 5 team, and zero losses probably do, too.

The highest a Group Of 5 team has ever been ranked by the committee is UCF at No. 12, behind five two-loss teams and one three-loss team (that it would go on to beat in a bowl game). Would a win over a Power 5 team have powered UCF into the top four? No way of knowing.