The second College Football Playoff rankings reveal ruffled plenty of feathers on Tuesday, with the one-loss Alabama Crimson Tide moving to #2 and the one-loss Notre Dame Fighting Irish slotting in at #4 over undefeated teams like the #5 Iowa Hawkeyes, #6 Baylor Bears and #8 Oklahoma State Cowboys.
However, the rankings are just a snapshot of the committee's current gauge of where teams stand right now. There are plethora of huge regular-season matchups coming down the chute, along with the craziness that conference championship games always tend to incur. Teams in the top four are almost guaranteed to drop out (and maybe back in), while remaining "prove it" games could vault a team from out of the picture into the CFP penthouse.
Taking a look at the ESPN Power Index's remaining strength of schedule ranks, the one-loss #12 Oklahoma Sooners have the toughest remaining schedule by a wide margin, with games remaining at #6 Baylor, at home against the #15 TCU Horned Frogs and back on the road at #8 Oklahoma State. If Oklahoma loses one of those games, it won't hurt their New Year's Six bowl chances very much at all. That's one positive. In addition, if they somehow win all three of those games, though, the triple resume boost should be enough to land them a CFP final four slot hands down.
Oklahoma's Big 12 conference mates, Baylor and Oklahoma State, have similarly difficult roads ahead ranked 4th and 11th respectively in remaining strength of schedule. The one bonus for any of these three teams is that running the table in the regular season is made even more important by the fact that the Big 12 doesn't have a championship game. A regular-season ending hot streak would make anyone of these three teams hard to deny as CFP candidates.
Outside of the Big 12, the #9 LSU Tigers (9th), #7 Stanford Cardinal (12th) and #3 Ohio State Buckeyes (17th) top the list for undefeated or one-loss College Football Playoff contenders when it comes to strength of schedule. However, where the lack of a Big 12 title game helps Oklahoma, Baylor and Oklahoma State, winning a conference title game could serve to boost any of the others' strength of schedule by beating yet another top-level opponent.
To be clear, strength of schedule is just one component of what the committee will be judging when they release their final CFP rankings after the season. Regardless, the addition of marquee wins on a candidate's resume is bound to resonate in a big way. For a team like Oklahoma, that opens up a huge opportunity to make a College Football Playoff run.
Here's an easy-to-digest list of the above six undefeated and one-loss contenders ordered by their upcoming strength of schedule:
Oklahoma Sooners (1st): at #6 Baylor, #15 TCU, at #8 Oklahoma State
Baylor Bears (4th): #12 Oklahoma, at #8 Oklahoma State, at #15 TCU, Texas
LSU Tigers (9th): Arkansas, at Ole Miss, Texas A&M
Oklahoma State Cowboys (11th): at Iowa State, #6 Baylor, #12 Oklahoma
Stanford Cardinal (12th): Oregon, Cal, #4 Notre Dame
Ohio State Buckeyes (17th): at Illinois, #13 Michigan State, at #14 Michigan
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