If we slapped the Alabama or Georgia logo on Kentucky's helmets, where would the Wildcats have landed within the College Football Playoff's first batch of rankings? What if we swapped out UK's loss to a strong Bama team with a win over an FCS opponent so the Wildcats could match Utah's zero in the loss column? What if Kentucky were the reigning national champions like Indiana?
As it stands, UK landed at No. 6 behind the Bulldogs, Crimson Tide, Utes, and Hoosiers (and No. 1 Miami). This disrespect for UK came despite the fact that the Wildcats own the best resume score in a true meritocratic breakdown of what college football teams have accomplished entering Week 10. Because of the CFP selection committee's seeming obsession with arbitrary cutoffs, the totality of UK's achievements is not being properly considered.
That was obvious during Tuesday night's first playoff rankings reveal. Since Kentucky has only two wins against teams ranked in the CFP Top 25 (LSU and South Carolina), its road victories over Texas A&M and Oklahoma are being undervalued. Both rank inside the top 30 of the CFB Metrics Consensus, which blends 10 reputable power rankings into a single 1-138 breakdown.
Want to stick exclusively with high-end fare? By the standard of ESPN's FPI metric, Kentucky owns a higher-ranked victory (over FPI No. 5 LSU) than both Georgia and Alabama. In addition to the LSU win, the Wildcats own three road wins over top-30 power-rated opposition.
Georgia, which landed four spots ahead of Kentucky at No. 2, possesses one fewer victory against top-30 opposition, and its lone loss (at home to Auburn) is significantly worse than Kentucky's lone loss (at home vs. Using our resume ranking system also reveals how nonsensical it was for Utah to land at No. 3 in the first CFP rankings. The 8-0 Utes have played one team ranked inside the top 50 of the CFB Metrics Consensus, picking up a home win over No. 22 Houston.
How the Utes landed ahead of a UK team that has four wins against top-50 opposition is an inexplicable head-scratcher that can only be chalked up to an over-reliance on predictive metrics. The same can be said with Indiana, which doesn't have nearly the same resume strength as Kentucky. But the Wildcats are just 26th in ESPN's FPI.
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