It always makes for compelling football whenever ranked teams do battle. But which teams tend to perform the best when they face off with a ranked team?
ESPN’s Chris Low recently calculated the winning percentage of teams against ranked teams since 2015 that have faced at least 20 opponents. Unsurprisingly, Alabama came out on top with a whopping 83.3-percent.
Alabama have barely lost at all in the Nick Saban era. So it should be no shock to anyone that their winning percentage is so high.
Coming in second is Ohio State, the only team that beats more than 80-percent of their ranked opponents at 80.5-percent. Clemson takes third with 78.1-percent, while Oklahoma’s 73.5-percent win rate over ranked foes comes in fourth.
Georgia, Oklahoma State and LSU round out the top seven, winning well over half of their games against ranked opponents.
Given that Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson and Oklahoma have made multiple appearances in the college football playoff, you would expect that they did so on the heels of wins over ranked opponents.
You need some big wins to qualify for the College Football Playoff, and those four teams have consistently gone whole seasons with at most one or two regular season Ls.
But maybe those numbers will change this year.
A new season is coming up and if there’s one constant in college football – it’s change.