The College Football Playoff’s Greatest Snubs: Teams That Were Shockingly Left Out
Ever wonder which powerhouse college football teams were so good they should’ve partied in the College Football Playoff, but alas, never got the invite? Since 2014, the CFP has been the holy grail for elite squads, yet some have been left at the door despite their undeniable talent. With the 2024 expansion to a 12-team format, many assumed that no top-tier team would be brushed aside again—no more snubs like the 2023 Florida State team that went undefeated yet got shut out. But nope, the plot thickens. Just two years into the new setup, even a 10-2 Notre Dame, ranked ninth in the AP Top 25, found itself on the outside looking in, sparking shockwaves across the college football world. So, who really are the biggest victims of the CFP snub? Thanks to our historical TRACR rankings—a nifty metric that gauges team efficiency against quality opponents—we peel back the curtain on the greatest “what might have beens” in college football playoff history. Buckle up; this isn’t your average ranking list. LEARN MORE.
With the help of our historical TRACR rankings, we’ve identified the best teams that have been left out of the College Football Playoff since its inception in 2014.
When college football moved to a new 12-team format in 2024, the belief was that it was going to be tougher to leave an elite team out of the bracket.
After all, a team that was among the nation’s most talented but lost a couple of close contests to good opponents still had a great chance to build a strong resume and compete for a championship when January came around.
We certainly would never have another situation like the 2023 Florida State team that went 13-0 en route to the ACC title but was not invited to the CFP. That year, the committee made history by excluding an undefeated Power Five conference champion for the first time, sparking debate about whether it was the biggest snub in college football history.
But that was the final bracket of the four-team era. With three times as many teams now included, the elite teams were sure to get in, whether the committee used the eye test, statistical metrics, or general past precedent. Right?
Not quite. It took just two years for that assumption to come crumbling down after 10-2 Notre Dame was left out of this year’s bracket despite finishing ninth in the AP Top 25.
“My feelings and the feelings here are just shock and, really, an absolute sense of sadness for our student-athletes,” Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua told Yahoo Sports. “Overwhelming shock and sadness. Like a collective feeling that we were all just punched in the stomach.”
Do the Fighting Irish have a legitimate gripe? Are they one of the biggest snubs of the CFP era Since the committee and media have their biases and opinions, we’re going to lean on our historic TRACR rankings for answers.
TRACR (Team Rating Adjusted for Conference and Roster) is a net efficiency metric that measures how good a team is at every play relative to the quality of its opponent. A team with a TRACR of 0.0 is considered an average team in the FBS. So if a team with a 7.5 TRACR faced a team with a minus-3.0 TRACR on a neutral site, the better team would be expected to win by about 10.5 points if both teams ran the same number of plays, according to the model.
Below, we rank the best teams to miss out on the College Football Playoff (since 2014) by their TRACR (in parentheses). One thing to note, we did omit the 2020 season since the majority of teams only played 10 games in that pandemic-shortened campaign.
1. 2019 Alabama (42.67)
For much of the 2018 season – Tua Tagovailoa’s first as the starting QB – Alabama was in the realistic conversation for the best college team of all time, until the Crimson Tide fell to Clemson in that year’s national championship.
And then, for much of the 2019 season, it seemed that Alabama was even better.
Led by Tagovailoa and the “Ryde Outs” (wide receivers DeVonta Smith, Henry Ruggs, Jerry Jeudy and Jaylen Waddle), who all returned from the 2018 team, the Crimson Tide offense was on another level. The team averaged a ridiculous 47.2 points per game, and as a matter of fact, Tagovailoa ended up finishing the 2019 season with a 206.9 pass efficiency rating (the FBS record at the time, minimum 250 attempts).
The Crimson Tide fell to eventual national champion LSU 46-41 in one of the greatest regular-season games in college football history. The two teams combined for 1,100 total yards, but Alabama lost the turnover battle in an all-time shootout against Joe Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase, Justin Jefferson and company.
Tagovailoa suffered a hip fracture in the Crimson Tide’s next game, but Alabama still had a very strong chance to make the CFP before falling to Auburn 48-45 in one of the wildest Iron Bowls you’ll ever see.
Mac Jones would lead Alabama to the ensuing season’s championship, though.
2. 2017 Ohio State (38.78)
It’s not often that the Big Ten champion has been left out of the CFP. The Buckeyes did end up with two losses in 2017, but they also beat the No. 2 (Penn State) and No. 3 (Wisconsin) teams in the country. The win over the Badgers came in the Big Ten Championship game.
With J.T. Barrett, J.K. Dobbins and Terry McLaurin leading the offense and Nick Bosa and Denzel Ward leading the defense, Ohio State finished fifth in the final AP Top 25.
Clemson, Oklahoma, Georgia and Alabama qualified for the four-team field that year, though Ohio State had a higher TRACR than all of them.
3. 2018 Georgia (38.16)
In a 2018 showdown, the Bulldogs were hungry for revenge after a 26-23 overtime loss to Alabama in the prior year’s national championship game, thanks to Tua Tagovailoa’s “2nd-and-26” touchdown pass, and a Georgia team that returned much of its personnel from that group had Nick Saban’s team on the ropes.
Georgia led 28-14 in the second half, but Tagovailoa got hurt and Jalen Hurts led a comeback for the ages in Alabama’s 35-28 win.
Because Georgia had already taken a prior regular-season loss to Joe Burrow and LSU, this was enough to knock the Bulldogs out of the CFP picture, as one-loss Oklahoma moved into the No. 4 spot to join unbeaten Clemson, Alabama and Notre Dame.
As such, Kirby Smart, Jake Fromm and company came up short of a championship again, though the Bulldogs would get plenty of glory once the 2020s came around.
4. 2022 Alabama (37.48)
Contrary to popular belief, the committee hasn’t done everything it can to get Alabama in the field. We’ve already listed the 2019 Crimson Tide as the best team to miss the CFP.
It happened again in 2022 when the Tide were left out in the cold after an 10-2 regular season. During a stretch in which it faced five ranked opponents in six games, Bama suffered heartbreaking road losses at No. 6 Tennessee (52-49) and No. 15 LSU (32-31).
“Hey, look. We lost two plays on the last play of the game. (TCU) was 12-1 and lost to Kansas State. And we beat Kansas State by 25 or 28 points and we would’ve been favored by that last team by 13 points that got in, but we didn’t get in and they got in,” former Alabama coach Nick Saban would say two years later.
5. 2019 Georgia (36.55)
With Jake Fromm, D’Andre Swift, George Pickens and the nation’s top defense, the 12-2 Bulldogs were almost as good as anyone. But a four-team field leaves little margin for error during a season that was loaded with elite teams (see below).
The one that hurt was a 20-17 home loss to a South Carolina team that finished 4-8. Still, Georgia had another shot to get in with a victory in the SEC Championship game.
That was always going to be a tough task against a star-studded LSU team that went on to the win the national championship. Joe Burrow threw for 349 yards and four touchdowns – including one each to Justin Jefferson and Ja’Marr Chase – in a 37-10 rout.
6. 2023 Georgia (35.99)
Georgia’s season was almost a carbon copy of Ohio State’s in 2023 (more on them later). Both teams were undefeated until a high-stakes showdown against a rival – in Georgia’s case, that meant the SEC Championship against 11-1 Alabama.
And both teams lost one-possession games despite out-gaining their opponent in total yards, as Georgia lost a 27-24 battle in what ended up being the final Nick Saban-Kirby Smart game.
In previous seasons, a three-point loss to Alabama probably wouldn’t have been enough to knock a team from No. 1 to out of the Playoff.
7. 2025 Notre Dame (34.60)
So there you have it. The Fighting Irish, who were the “first team out” in the committee’s rankings, are the seventh-biggest snub of the CFP era, according to TRACR.
Notre Dame had fallen one spot from the previous week’s rankings and No. 10 Miami jumped two spots to earn the final at-large spot despite neither team playing a game during Championship Weekend.
“We had that side-by-side comparison (of Miami and Notre Dame) and you look at those two teams on paper and they are almost equal,” CFP committee chair Hunter Yurachek said. “The one metric we had to fall back on was head-to-head.”
The Irish lost at Miami 27-24 on Aug. 31 and at home to Texas A&M 41-40 on Sept. 13 before running off 10 straight victories by an average of 29.7 points.
8. 2023 Ohio State (32.92)
As it pertains to how good a team looked at the college level, it’s just about impossible for a team to stack up with the 2023 Buckeyes and still miss the CFP.
Marvin Harrison Jr. made big-time plays all season on offense, and the defense allowed 17 points or fewer in each of the team’s first 11 games, including top-10 wins over Notre Dame and Penn State.
This led Ohio State into a showdown at The Big House against fellow 11-0 Michigan, in one of the most anticipated contests in the history of “The Game.” The Buckeyes won the yardage battle but had two turnovers in a 30-24 loss.
Given that the Wolverines finished the season as the undefeated national champions, a very reasonable argument could be made that Ohio State was the second-best team in college football.
In a lot of years, that might have been enough to get into the CFP. But 2023 was the only time in the CFP era that every Power Five conference champion had one or fewer losses, meaning that Ohio State – and the team listed right below them in these rankings – were left out.
9. 2019 Florida (31.62)
It’s hard to believe that Florida has never made a CFP, but the Gators had their chance in 2019. Their only losses that season came 42-28 at eventual national champion LSU and 24-17 to a visiting Georgia team that finished fourth in the final AP Top 25.
10. 2017 Auburn (31.34)
Auburn finished the regular season 10-2 in 2017, falling to No. 3 Clemson 14-6 and LSU 27-23 – both on the road. The Tigers probably had one last chance to make a CFP argument, but they fell 28-7 to Georgia in the SEC Championship game.
For more coverage, follow along on social media on Instagram, Bluesky, Facebook and X.
The post What Might Have Been: The Best Teams to Miss Out on the College Football Playoff appeared first on Opta Analyst.
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