College football has a scheduling problem, or at least the perception of one. Programs are encouraged to schedule marquee nonconference opponents, producing compelling matchups and substantial commercial value. Yet the consequences of losing those games can threaten their College Football Playoff aspirations. This creates an apparent contradiction between what benefits college football collectively and what benefits individual programs.
The 2025 season brought this tension into focus. Indiana completed an undefeated regular season, won the Big Ten championship, and entered the playoff as the nation’s top-ranked team despite playing a relatively modest nonconference schedule. Texas, meanwhile, opened its season against Ohio State, suffered a loss, and ultimately finished 9–3, ranked 13th and excluded from the 12-team playoff. Texas coach Steve Sarkisian subsequently questioned the incentive to schedule opponents such as Ohio State when the additional difficulty might jeopardize playoff qualification.
The College Football Playoff’s recently announced expansion to 24 teams adds another dimension to this debate. Beginning in 2027, Power Four programs will be expected to play at least 10 games against qualifying opponents, including conference members, other Power Four programs, and Notre Dame. The policy explicitly seeks to encourage more compelling nonconference matchups, suggesting that playoff administrators recognize a need to influence schools’ scheduling decisions. Yet the rule leaves an important distinction unresolved: playing a Power Four opponent does not necessarily mean playing a strong opponent. Programs can satisfy the requirement while continuing to minimize competitive risk.
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The underlying economic question is therefore straightforward: Does the College Football Playoff reward programs sufficiently for scheduling stronger opponents, or does it create incentives to pursue the easiest permissible path to postseason qualification? This question resembles one of economics’ most recognizable strategic problems: the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma describes a situation in which individuals pursuing their own interests produce an outcome that is collectively inferior to one achievable through cooperation. Applied to college football, consider two major programs choosing their nonconference schedules. Both can pursue aggressive scheduling, accepting greater competitive risk in exchange for prominent matchups, or conservative scheduling, prioritizing opponents they are more likely to defeat.
Aggressive scheduling can benefit the broader college football ecosystem through television audiences, sponsorship opportunities, ticket demand, and national interest. However, if playoff selection disproportionately rewards winning percentage, each program may rationally prefer a weaker opponent regardless of what other schools choose. The resulting equilibrium could feature fewer high-profile games, even though all participants would benefit collectively from stronger competition.
For this to constitute a genuine Prisoner’s Dilemma, three conditions must hold:
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Conservative scheduling must provide an individual advantage regardless of other programs’ decisions.
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Aggressive scheduling must generate greater collective value.
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Individually rational decisions must produce a stable outcome inferior to mutual cooperation.
The critical empirical question concerns the first condition: Does the CFP committee reward winning percentage sufficiently more than strength of schedule to make conservative scheduling advantageous?
I examined every final CFP ranking from 2014 through 2025, encompassing 1,566 FBS team-seasons and 300 ranked team-seasons. I reconstructed team records and strength of schedule using only games completed before each season’s final selection decisions, preventing subsequent bowl and playoff results from influencing the analysis.
The initial findings confirm that winning percentage is the strongest observable signal associated with committee rankings. Winning percentage exhibited a Spearman correlation of 0.672 with better CFP ranking position, compared with 0.170 for the reconstructed strength-of-schedule measure. These descriptive correlations indicate that winning percentage has a substantially stronger unconditional relationship with committee evaluation. However, correlations alone cannot establish how the committee weighs two otherwise comparable résumés.
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To investigate this distinction, I examined cases in which winning percentage and schedule strength conflict. I identified 1,442 comparisons involving ranked teams with similar estimated underlying quality, where one team possessed the better record while the other faced the more difficult schedule. In 70.2% of those comparisons, the committee ranked the team with the better record higher. That finding supports the conventional argument that wins command a substantial premium.
Yet the preference weakened when the difference between teams was exactly one win. In those comparisons, the better-record team prevailed 62.7% of the time, leaving more than one-third of decisions favoring the stronger schedule. The implication is important. Although winning percentage dominates many comparisons, strength of schedule provides meaningful compensating value.
To quantify that tradeoff, I estimated the committee’s historical preference between an additional win and an improvement in schedule strength. Using a ranking model designed to account for the committee publishing only its top 25 teams, I estimated the schedule-strength improvement required to compensate for moving from an 11–1 record to 10–2. The result was approximately 1.31 points on my reconstructed strength-of-schedule scale, with a 95% uncertainty interval of 1.01 to 1.73.
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For a representative ranked program facing a schedule around the 65th percentile nationally, my model suggests that improving schedule difficulty to approximately the 92nd percentile could compensate for one additional loss. This represents a substantial increase in schedule strength, but one that is achievable within the historical distribution.
The finding establishes that the committee assigns measurable value to competitive difficulty. Furthermore, the estimated relationship remained reasonably stable across several alternative model specifications, although the precise magnitude varied with the treatment of conference affiliation and team quality.
The implication for athletic departments is that scheduling decisions involve competing marginal benefits. A weaker opponent increases the probability of winning, while a stronger opponent improves the résumé against which those wins and losses are evaluated. Consequently, maximizing expected wins does not necessarily maximize expected committee evaluation.
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The contrasting experiences of Indiana and Texas offer an opportunity to illustrate these competing incentives. We simulated replacing one opponent on each school’s 2025 schedule, incorporating the probability of winning the alternative matchup and its effect on schedule strength.
For Indiana, replacing Indiana State with an FBS opponent at the 75th percentile of team strength increased the program’s modeled committee evaluation by 0.86 points. The estimated improvement remained positive across the calculated uncertainty interval. In other words, Indiana’s already favorable record provided enough protection that a stronger opponent’s schedule credit outweighed the relatively small reduction in expected victories.
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Texas produced a different result. Replacing Ohio State with an opponent at the 25th percentile increased Texas’ expected victories by approximately 0.86. However, the accompanying reduction in schedule strength offset much of that advantage. The resulting estimated change in committee evaluation was slightly negative, but its uncertainty interval crossed zero. The analysis therefore cannot establish whether Texas would have benefited from scheduling the weaker opponent.
These counterfactuals are illustrative rather than causal estimates. They use retrospective team ratings and hold the remainder of each season constant. Nevertheless, they demonstrate why the presumed advantage of conservative scheduling cannot be treated as universal.
The evidence indicates that the College Football Playoff Selection Committee favors stronger winning records in comparable résumé conflicts. However, strength of schedule receives sufficient recognition that weaker opponents do not consistently produce better expected evaluations.
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This challenges a central condition of the Prisoner’s Dilemma: conservative scheduling must be individually advantageous regardless of competitors’ decisions. Instead, the optimal strategy depends on opponent strength, win probability, and the committee’s recognition of schedule difficulty. These considerations will become increasingly important as the playoff expands to 24 teams, introducing new incentives around qualification and seeding.
College football’s scheduling incentives are therefore more complex than conventional wisdom suggests. Winning carries a substantial premium, but stronger opponents can provide enough schedule credit to justify the additional risk. The committee’s historical treatment of schedule strength may already help mitigate the perceived Prisoner’s Dilemma. The remaining question is whether athletic departments accurately recognize the value of taking that risk.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com
