There are three undefeated teams remaining in college football heading into Week 12 — Ohio State, Indiana, and Texas A&M. Then there are eight one-loss teams. Seven one-loss teams — Alabama, Georgia, Texas Tech,
Ole Miss, Oregon, BYU, and Georgia Tech warranted rankings by the College Football Playoff committee in Tuesday night’s rankings reveal.
The other one-loss team, James Madison, didn’t.
Sitting at 8-1 on a 7-game win streak, the Dukes were snubbed by the committee after receiving a No. 24 ranking in Sunday’s AP Poll. The only blemish on James Madison’s is a 28-14 Week 2 loss to No. 20 Louisville — a game which the Dukes held a 14-6 third quarter lead and entered the final frame knotted at 14 apiece, before the Cardinals closed with two fourth quarter touchdowns.
Otherwise, James Madison has been quite dominant, winning seven of its eight games by double-digits, with a 63-27 throttling of 6-3 Old Dominion as the leading result on its season résumé. However, Old Dominion is the only team above .500 that the Dukes have unseated, and strength of schedule is the No. 1 metric the committee cited for snubbing JMU from its rankings.
“I think with James Madison, the part that was really hard to overcome for the committee was their schedule strength,” committee chair Mack Rhoades said after the Tuesday night rankings reveal. Just quite frankly, that was a big part of that conversation.”
In order to qualify for the College Football Playoff, James Madison must finish as one of the five highest-ranked conference champions. Currently, five conferences — Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, ACC, and American — are represented in the rankings, meaning the Dukes would be snubbed if the season ended today. The most beneficial outcomes for James Madison’s CFP prospects, along with winning out and claiming the Sun Belt title, likely involve a 4-loss Duke as the ACC champion or a 3-loss American champion such as East Carolina — two hypothetical teams the 12-1 Dukes could vault in the rankings.
But James Madison can only do its task ahead, and that’s win out. Appalachian State and Coastal Carolina remain on the Sun Belt schedule with a non-conference matchup vs. Washington State sandwiched in between.
“The way you do that is, I used to believe you don’t talk about it at all,” James Madison head coach Bob Chesney said about his team’s CFP prospects in his Monday press conference. “They’re certainly talking about it, especially nowadays in the world of social media and how many different people are covering it. I mean, I’m on a TV show the other day. It’s kind of ridiculous when you think about that we’re trying to stay focused and win games and not think about anything else. But these are things that are important for the community and they’re important for the guys that got us here at this point in time. So it would be foolish and a little bit shortsighted and unfair to brush it under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist, because it does exist and we all know that.”
Chesney’s team fended off a potential game-winning drive from Marshall late in the fourth quarter last week, and the coach understands that with James Madison’s national scrutiny, the Dukes will continue to get the best effort from their opponents down the stretch.
“The work still has to be done,” Chesney said. “A number next to your name doesn’t make people bow down when they walk in here. In fact, it increases the bullseye. We have to understand and embrace that bullseye and understand our job is to go out there and hunt. Not be the hunted but to hunt. And that is exactly what we’ll continue to do.”
