In College Football Playoff committee chairman Jeff Long's video conference after Tuesday's rankings were released, he mentioned a team's "body of work" five times.
Based on Long's prior comments, when the committee is assessing a team's body of work, it is specifically taking into account a team's wins, losses, nonconference schedule and top-25 wins, among other factors.
ESPN Stats & Information has developed the framework to break down a team's body of work further. Strength of Record measures the difficulty of achieving a team's record given the opponents it faced. This is an all-encompassing metric that accounts for all of the factors above.
Instead of counting top-25 wins, we have broken "good" wins into two categories: quality and elite. The issue with top-25 wins is that not all top-25 teams are created equal. When Alabama beat then-No. 1 Mississippi State, it was not the same win as Ohio State beating No. 25 Minnesota. Similarly, beating No. 25 at home is arguably easier than beating No. 30 on the road.
By separating the wins into quality and elite, we can account for the variance in the top 25 and the site of the game.
A quality win is defined as a win that an average top-25 team would have less than a 75 percent chance of winning, based on opponent strength (using the Football Power Index) and game site. There have been 116 quality wins this season.
An elite win is defined as a win that an average top-25 team would have less than a 50 percent chance of winning, and there have been 21 elite wins this season.
Using this framework to break down each team's résumés, how do the top seven teams in the CFP rankings stack up?
1. Alabama Crimson Tide
1st in Strength of Record
7 quality wins | 2 elite wins
Alabama has a Football Bowl Subdivision-high seven quality wins and is one of three FBS teams with two elite wins. Yet when looking at their schedule, the Tide have beaten only one team currently ranked in the CFP top 25.
How can that be? The SEC West is beating up on each other, and teams like Arkansas, Texas A&M and LSU are dropping like flies. Those teams still rank in the top 20 of FPI, and it would be hard for an average top-25 team to beat them, let alone two of them on the road. Despite playing one current CFP top 25 opponent, ESPN's metrics say Alabama has played the third-hardest schedule and has the top Strength of Record in the nation.