College Football Playoff Makes Big Change That Could Swing in Alabama's Favor

The debates in Alabama's favor revolved around the importance of strength of schedule, as the Crimson Tide's opponents throughout the season were ranked higher than SMU's. But on Wednesday, the CFP committee announced some alterations to this year's criteria, and it can swing in Alabama's favor.

"Changes for the upcoming season include enhancements to the tools that the selection committee uses to assess schedule strength and how teams perform against their schedule," the CFP committee wrote in a statement. "The current schedule strength metric has been adjusted to apply greater weight to games against strong opponents.

"An additional metric, record strength, has been added to the selection committee's analysis to go beyond a team's schedule strength to assess how a team performed against that schedule. This metric rewards teams defeating high-quality opponents while minimizing the penalty for losing to such a team.

"Conversely, these changes will provide minimal reward for defeating a lower-quality opponent while imposing a greater penalty for losing to such a team."

Alabama head coach Kalen DeBoer assessed the CFP committee's decision on Dec. 8, 2024, and emphasized that the strength of schedule was not utilized enough, despite the committee stating its importance in the guidelines.

"We want to play competitive games, we want to play the best games and I understand how it didn't feel like that. It definitely wasn't rewarded," DeBoer said. "It felt like with our schedule and the wins that we had against teams that were ranked––now or even at the time––LSU was at the time, but not anymore. I'll let [Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne] administratively lead the charge and understand what needs to be done in the future, if anything at all.

"We've got some higher profile games against programs that traditionally have been very successful and we want to be a part of that and we want that to happen. That's the exciting thing about college football is being in as many big games as possible. I don't want to back down to that, we want to be a part of it and that hopefully will be rewarded down the road."

DeBoer referenced Byrne's thoughts, as the Alabama AD took X (formerly known as Twitter) on Dec. 8 to discuss the committee's decision.

"Disappointed with the outcome and felt we were one of the 12 best teams in the country," Byrne wrote. "We had an extremely challenging schedule and recognized there were two games in particular that we did not perform as well as we should have.

"We have said that we would need to see how the strength of schedule would be evaluated by the CFP. With this outcome, we will need to assess how many P4 non-conference games make sense in the future to put us in the best position to participate in the CFP. That is not good for college football."

Alabama currently has the 12th-toughest strength of schedule, according to ESPN. There are 10 SEC teams ahead of the Crimson Tide in this metric.