Thanks, Terry, for that educated approach. I felt all along that IU not only beat the teams on its schedule, but with the exception of the loss to Ohio State and the 5-point win over Michigan, they beat them convincingly. Your SOR metric makes a more convincing case than I with my semi-techno ignorance. It's one thing to support the team's presence in the CFP. It's quite another to use ready available metrics to make the case.
I know hypotheticals are dangerous but under your SOR approach would anything change if Alabama’s 3 losses were to So. Carolina, Tennessee and Missouri (i.e. 3 ranked teams) and a win against UGA.
KP, I don't pretend to know all the details of what goes into those analytics formulas, those dudes are rocket scientists - literally in some cases - and techno wizards. I am just an old retired finance guy. My understanding of SOR is that it measures strength of schedule first then computes the number of losses that an average team would have facing that schedule. A teams SOR is the difference between calculated average losses and a teams actual losses. That being the case, a team with the lower SOS would always be ranked lower than all other teams with the same record. Important for us all to keep in mind here that this just 1 of hundreds of metrics available in this age where digital data is ubiquitous and when combined with endless compute power we get all these advanced analytics at the click of a mouse. Literally every snap in every game of every team is now recorded, measured and manipulated into a series of analytics that provide insights on a detailed level -and has been for prob a decade now. This has given us plenty of time to assess and adjust based upon past results. Data can be and is easily adjusted for strength of opponent and "garbage time" and we get fun measures like game control, offensive efficiency, success rate, explosiveness, stuff rate, havoc rate, red zone efficiency and others too numerous to mention. These data are factors in overall measures of opponent-adjusted strength that you prob have heard of like S&P+, FEI, etc. These analytics are available commercially and publicly in some instances. The Committee has all of this and more at their disposal where they get real-time, comprehensive measures of team performance all of which have been adjusted for "garbage time" and opponent strength. The main point being here is that W-L records are just one of many, many data points considered and my opinion, the least insightful of all. Kiffin knows all of this better than I. He is just a whiner and thus far the actual results on the field are making him look worse than ever