Will Any College Football Team Go Undefeated in 2015?
Going undefeated in college football is difficult. These days, it can be nearly impossible.
Of the 1,500-plus teams that have suited up for Division I-A or now FBS competition since 2000, only 15 of them have finished a season with an undefeated record.
Five of those teams came from non-power conferences. Three had to win only 12 contests for perfection. The majority didn't have to play in a conference championship game.
.jpg?w=256 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
| 2000 | Oklahoma | 13-0 | Yes |
| 2001 | Miami | 12-0 | No |
| 2002 | Ohio State | 14-0 | No |
| 2004 | USC | 13-0 | No |
| 2004 | Auburn | 13-0 | Yes |
| 2004 | Utah | 12-0 | No |
| 2005 | Texas | 13-0 | Yes |
| 2006 | Boise State | 13-0 | No |
| 2008 | Utah | 13-0 | No |
| 2009 | Boise State | 14-0 | No |
| 2009 | Alabama | 14-0 | Yes |
| 2010 | TCU | 13-0 | No |
| 2010 | Auburn | 14-0 | Yes |
| 2012 | Ohio State | 12-0 | No |
| 2013 | Florida State | 14-0 | Yes |
Simple math says it gets harder to go undefeated with each game you play. The chances drop when the season goes longer. Another game means another 60-plus minutes a team must stay unbeaten, and the competition is usually stronger in conference championship and bowl games.
The perfect season is a monstrous goal to reach, and that's why six of the last 10 national champions have had at least one loss on their record.
"Most championship teams are going to lose somewhere along the way, and it's all about how you respond to that loss," Akron head coach Terry Bowden, who led Auburn to an undefeated season in 1993, told Brian Bennett of ESPN.com in a 2013 interview. "To go undefeated, everything has to go right. The ball has to bounce your way a bunch of times."
Now, with the advent of the College Football Playoff, the odds of a team winning every game in a given season are even longer. After a 2014 without an unbeaten team, will perfection make its return this season?
The small list of probable candidates for an undefeated 2015 can be placed into three categories. Let's take a look at each group and its best chances at perfection.
The 15-0 Crowd
Most teams that could go undefeated in 2015 must do something that has never been done before in the history of college football—complete a 15-0 season.
In the BCS era, the most games a team had to win in order to complete the perfect campaign was 14. Before bigger schedules and conference title games, undefeated national champions normally had 11 or 12 wins.
Now, if you're a team in a Power Five league, you most likely have to win 12 regular-season contests, a conference championship game, a national semifinal and title game. Florida State is a testament to the toughness of that feat as it entered last year's playoff as the lone undefeated team, eventually losing to a powerful Oregon team in the Rose Bowl.
Pulling off the first 15-win season will require a lot of overall strength, even more depth and a favorable schedule.
That third bit of criteria will knock out plenty of teams, especially ones in the SEC West and the Pac-12 South. Those treacherous divisions have several possible title contenders, but they all face each other during the regular season.
Only three SEC teams have gone undefeated since 2000, and the Pac-12 has just one, a 2004 USC team that played in the pre-conference title days.
Cross-divisional opponents can't get away from the tough competition, either. This year, Georgia plays Auburn and Alabama, while Oregon faces Arizona State and USC on top of a road contest at nonconference power Michigan State.
The ACC doesn't have a surefire candidate for an undefeated season, either. Preseason favorite Clemson, which only has three returning starters on defense, plays Notre Dame and Georgia Tech. Three-time defending ACC champion Florida State must go to Clemson and Georgia Tech with plenty of new starters this year.
That leaves the Big Ten and what should be the unanimous preseason No. 1 team—Ohio State. The Buckeyes have most of their starters back from last season's national title team, and their toughest game of the season will be a home contest against fellow contender Michigan State.
Ohio State is by far the best bet to pull off the unprecedented 15-0 season in a year that will have many potential contenders but only one hands-down favorite.
However, Urban Meyer's team should know better than anyone else about the upset-friendly nature of college football, and it must also travel to Virginia Tech, the team that prevented a perfect OSU season last year.
The Big 12 Exception
Of course, that journey through the Power Five conferences left out one major league—the Big 12—which has a pair of title contenders this season in Baylor and TCU.
If the winner of the Baylor-TCU matchup on Nov. 27 exits the game with an undefeated record, it has the advantage of not having to play in a conference championship game. But Baylor will have to beat Texas the following week to get to 12 wins.
The Big 12 has a 10-team, round-robin format, and the "one true champion" is, well, supposed to be determined in the regular season. An undefeated Big 12 champion would enter the College Football Playoff with a 12-0 record, meaning it would only need to win 14 games to pull off a perfect campaign.
Mathematically, that's an easier road, and it looks even easier when you put team names next to those 14 possible matchups.
Baylor's nonconference schedules have been notoriously soft in recent years, and this season the Bears face SMU, Lamar and Rice before hitting league play. Now Baylor is looking to strengthen those slates for the future, a move that is long past due, according to Jake Trotter of ESPN.com.
"It's about time," Trotter wrote. "Having won back-to-back Big 12 titles, Baylor has emerged into a big-time program. It's time the Bears start scheduling like one, too."
TCU has one tough nonconference game when it opens the season on a Thursday night at Big Ten opponent Minnesota, but the Horned Frogs should take care of business there. They then play Stephen F. Austin and SMU.
Baylor and TCU should be favorites in every game leading up to a brutal month of November, when the quest for an undefeated season gets infinitely tougher. Both teams play Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and each other.
Stacking those challenges on top of each other will make it extra difficult for the hypothetical undefeated team to come from the Big 12. Neither Baylor nor TCU will be able to cruise into the final four—both will have to survive and advance against a field of battle-hardened schools from other top conferences.
The Outsiders
With the 15-win objective for most of the Power Five schools and the rough ending to the schedule for the Big 12, college football's best bets to have an undefeated team at the end of the season come from elsewhere.
Independent Notre Dame has a lot of experience coming back in 2015, but it also has a tough-looking schedule with games against Georgia Tech, Clemson, USC and Stanford. Getting through that slate undefeated with a relatively new quarterback will be a tough task.
Better candidates can be found in the smaller-school ranks. Of the nine schools Bleacher Report's Brian Pedersen slated with the best chances at an unbeaten record earlier this year, four came from the lower leagues.
The original BCS buster, Boise State, could have the best odds at an undefeated run. The Broncos return 17 starters from a 12-2 team that defeated Arizona in the Fiesta Bowl, and the regular-season schedule sets up well after an opener against Washington and a road trip to BYU.
Getting into the College Football Playoff with that schedule and a Mountain West Championship Game victory seems nearly impossible for Boise State. But the Broncos would be a tough team for any power foe in a New Year's Six bowl—after all, they have plenty of experience winning the big game in January.
The second-best bet for a perfect regular season is all the way at the bottom of the NCAA's strength of schedule list, according to FBSchedules.com's Kevin Kelley.
Marshall's 12 opponents for the 2015 season combined for an atrocious 54-89 record last year. Despite the talent that's gone from the Thundering Herd's 13-1 team from a season ago, this is still a strong candidate to run the table.
"Marshall is still going to be more athletic than its competition on what is, yes, another pretty weak slate," Bill Connelly of SB Nation wrote. "A Purdue-Ohio-Kent State nonconference slate would have been pretty challenging in 2012, when all three went bowling, but none of those were top-80 teams in 2014. In fact, only one 2015 opponent was."
Each of these top contenders for a perfect 2015 season have great setups for success heading into the fall. But they also face the great unknown of the postseason.
A lot can change over the course of a wild college football season. A power team could surprise the experts and get on an unbeatable roll. But plenty of undefeated seasons fall every single year thanks to unbelievable upsets and crushing letdown losses for teams like Boise State and Marshall.
Thanks to the playoff system, picking against a perfect season seems like a safe bet in 2015.
Going undefeated is harder than ever these days. Good thing losing isn't fatal in the new system.
Justin Ferguson is an on-call college football writer at Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter @JFergusonBR.
.jpg?w=480 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
