Ranking Reaction: The challenge facing Baylor

Only one team inside the top eight of the College Football Playoff ranking has defeated another team inside the top eight: Baylor, seventh in this week's ranking, defeated fourth-ranked TCU on Oct. 11.

Baylor is also the only one-loss team in the Football Bowl Subdivision with a win against another one-loss opponent — essentially, one might suggest that Baylor owns the best victory of any realistic Playoff contender.

And yet the Bears sit in seventh, three spots behind the Horned Frogs, and might spend the rest of the regular season in a fruitless fight for the top four. The top six teams — Mississippi State, Oregon, Florida State, TCU, Alabama and Arizona State — control their own destinies; sitting just behind this top group, Baylor cannot say the same.

Three factors serve as potential roadblocks:

— Baylor simply won't be able to escape its nonconference schedule. Scheduling SMU, Northwestern State and Buffalo helped the Bears ease into Big 12 Conference play — and helped the team weather quarterback Bryce Petty's injury — but it should show FBS programs the possible drawback of choosing easy wins over out-of-conference tests.

The difference between Baylor and TCU, for example, is Minnesota. Both played SMU and a Football Championship Subdivision opponent in October; in the third game, however, the Bears played Buffalo and the Horned Frogs faced the Golden Gophers.

"We as a committee are not charged with sending messages to coaches and (athletics directors) about scheduling," said Arkansas athletics director Jeff Long, the chairman of the Playoff selection committee, "but I think it's likely that they will see the factors that we take into account and will take a message from that."

— The nature of the victory has provided a boost to TCU, in fact. The Horned Frogs led by 21 points in the fourth quarter before the Bears stormed ahead, eventually losing by a field goal on the road. In two ways, this benefits the loser: TCU's lone loss is the best of any top-six team, and Baylor needed a furious comeback to secure the win.

"For the third consecutive week, the committee looked at the overall body of work, their strength of schedule, and looked at the number of top‑25 wins," Long said, noting that TCU has two such wins to Baylor's one. "TCU's loss is a top‑10 loss. When you put all those factors together, we still think at this time TCU has a better résumé and was voted that way ahead of Baylor."

Baylor's biggest advantage is that head-to-head tiebreaker. This week, however, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said the league would not favor either Baylor or TCU to the selection committee as its conference champion.

— The takeaway is simple: By not considering Baylor as its winner by virtue of the victory against TCU, the Big 12 will simply allow the selection committee to view each as a conference champion — negating the Bears' advantage.

TCU instead holds the edge. If this week's basic theme holds, the eventual top four will have a representative from the SEC, either Mississippi State or Alabama; a representative from the Pac-12, either Oregon or Arizona State; Florida State from the ACC; and TCU from the Big 12. If so, Baylor would rise no higher than fifth.

Hope isn't lost. One reason why TCU sits ahead of the Bears is its edge in strength of schedule — in and out of conference play. But the schedule has played in the Frogs' favor: TCU has already played the best teams in the Big 12, leaving just Kansas, Texas and Iowa State to close out the regular season.

Baylor will have two additional chances to improve its Playoff résumé. The first comes on Nov. 22, when the Bears host Oklahoma State. Two weeks later, in the regular-season finale, Baylor meets Kansas State.

If both teams run the table to finish 11-1, Baylor and TCU will be separated by the slimmest of margins: TCU has the better loss, Baylor has the better win, TCU has the stronger overall schedule and Baylor has the head-to-head tiebreaker.

"I'd tell them to continue to build their résumé with their remaining games left," Long said of Baylor, "and make their case by their body of work and résumé."