Kalani Sitake's team walked off the field on October 28, 2024, having lost to Texas 27-12, and that single afternoon became the committee's permission slip to ignore everything that came after. Eleven wins. One loss. A program that had beaten everyone on its schedule except the team that ended up ranked 4th in the country. The College Football Playoff committee looked at BYU's resume, noted the strength of schedule ranked 6th nationally among Group of Five and mid-major adjacent programs, and quietly filed it in the drawer marked close but no.
Here is what bothers me about that. The 12-team bracket was supposed to fix exactly this problem. The whole sales pitch in 2022 and 2023, when the expansion was being negotiated, was that deserving teams would no longer get squeezed out by a 4-team field that could only accommodate the bluebloods. The Big 12 got Arizona State, Texas, and Utah into the field. Three bids from one conference. BYU, sitting at 11-1 with a head coach who has built something real in Provo, watched from home.
The Schedule Argument Has a Shelf Life
I will grant the committee this much: the head-to-head loss to Texas matters. You cannot completely ignore that BYU and Texas played, and Texas won by 15. That is a real data point, not a phantom.
But the schedule argument only goes so far before it starts eating itself. BYU does not control who the Big 12 puts on their non-conference slate or which opponents cancel. They play who they play. Penalizing a program for geography and conference affiliation while simultaneously handing 3 bids to the conference that beat them is a circular argument dressed up as rigor. Brett Yormark said it plainly on December 8th: the eye test is flawed. He was right, even if his motives were self-interested.
What the committee actually did was use strength of schedule as a polite way to say: we trust the SEC and Big Ten brand more than we trust your record. That is a preference, not a methodology. The 1994 Nebraska teams and the 2004 Utah team both ran into versions of this wall, programs that did what was asked of them and got told the room was full. College football has a long memory for this particular injustice.
What the Committee Owes the Sport
The honest version of the committee's decision would sound like this: BYU played a soft enough schedule that we cannot be certain they belong with the 12 best teams, and the margin of their loss to Texas was wide enough to tip the scales. Say that. Own it. The problem is that the committee hides behind composite rankings and résumé language while making decisions that feel, to anyone who watched the games, like they were made before the season ended.
Jax Moreno will tell you the numbers support the committee, that BYU's opponent win percentage was too low to justify inclusion and the model bears that out. He is not wrong about the numbers. He is wrong about what the numbers are measuring. A 12-team field that still manages to exclude an 11-1 team while including 3 teams from the same conference has not solved the access problem. It has just made the gatekeeping harder to see.
The committee should adopt a transparent, published rubric before the season starts, not a set of criteria revealed retroactively to justify conclusions already reached. BYU earned a conversation. They deserved a seat at the table. What they got instead was a polite letter and a long flight home from a bowl game that felt like a consolation prize, which is exactly what it was.
