Greg Sankey hammers SEC strength of schedule as College Football Playoff debate rages

Speaking on “The Pat McAfee Show” on Friday in Atlanta ahead of the SEC Championship Game, league commissioner Greg Sankey returned to a tried and true league talking point: The SEC strength of schedule is unmatched.

Much of the debate will inevitably circle around Alabama making the field as an at-large, as Texas, Georgia and Tennessee appear safely in the field. The Crimson Tide will want SMU to win the ACC to keep the path simple, but even if things don’t fall that way, Sankey thinks the way the Crimson Tide — or really any SEC team — proved itself against their conference schedule makes them worthy of a playoff spot.

Specifically, Sankey cited a composite strength of schedule rating that combines the Massey and Sagarin ratings with ESPN’s Football Power Index (FPI) which he said has 14 of 16 SEC teams ahead of all of the rest of the teams ranked in the CFP. The final two SEC teams are still ahead of a number of CFP-ranked teams in strength of schedule, he also said. Sankey did not share how the ratings were weighted in the calculation, if at all.

“There has to be recognition. Like I could pull out my email and show you our 16 teams’ strength of schedule. And this is not my rating, this Massey, FPI and Sagarin combined,” Sankey said. “So you combine all of those, 14 of our teams’ strength of schedule is greater than the first of the other Top 25 CFP teams. In other words: 14 of our 16 have stronger schedules than the next CFP team. And then the next two follow and then everybody else in the CFP Top 25 rankings has a lesser schedule than our 16 teams when you use that metric.”

Sankey’s strength of schedule comments echoes back to around this time last year when he argued “one of these things is not like the other,” alluded to Sesame Street before Florida State was snubbed for Alabama in the 2023 CFP.

But Sankey is unapologetic about pushing his league’s teams into the CFP. And he thinks there was strength top to bottom in the SEC in 2024.

“Yeah, you look at playing Vanderbilt,” Sankey said. “And I think people have under-appreciated the competitive effectiveness, the line play at Vanderbilt. Obviously have a quarterback that’s been a great story, but those have been hard games. You look at Georgia going to Kentucky, that’s a one-point game after South Carolina went in to Kentucky and had a great game. All of those things are part of the realities of scheduling in this new environment.”

He also added that in 2024, the SEC had a unique scheduling challenge of trying to balance things with two new teams in the league in Texas and Oklahoma.

“Like if you could have a perfect schedule, everybody’s total set of opponents would have a .500 record,” Sankey said. “They’d win what they lost. In our divisions, that disparity was like from 46% up to 64%, so a huge disparity. Going into the season, that disparity was narrowed greatly, like 48% to 54%. So we were close to having .500 records and opponents. But that’s backward looking for 12. Now here’s the problem: Oklahoma and Texas weren’t in the league. So how do you accommodate for that in the analytics? And then the transfer portal, lets be honest, has really changed things.”