The traditional fans tend to treat head-2-head as the ultimate arbiter of ranking 2 teams with identical records.
The more statistically-inclined crowd tend to treat h-2-h games as 'just another game' or data point, and don't give it special weight.
Which group is right? Are either? Both?!?
A&M beat Florida at home. It was a tie game late, and with Florida nearly in position to kick a FG, they fumbled and A&M wound up kicking a FG as time expired. Basically the closest outcome you can have, short of overtime.
Does anything else matter? A&M is 5-1. Florida is 5-1. Same conference. Played each other. H-2-H is the tie-breaker, nothing more to see here.
Well....maybe. Maybe not. What harm does it do to look deeper?
Fortunately for us, there are no wildly-imbalanced cupcake games to slant a strength-of-schedule look. And because of that, margin-of-victory may be more useful as well.
A&M's opponents:
0-6 Vanderbilt
6-0 Alabama
5-1 Florida
2-4 Miss State
3-4 Arkansas
2-5 Carolina...........total record, 18-20....nearly .500.
Florida's opponents:
3-4 Ole Miss
2-5 Carolina
5-1 A&M
2-3 Missouri
4-2 Georgia
3-4 Arkansas..........total record, 19-19....right at .500.
Their schedule strength has been roughly the same.
Then we should look at margin-of-victory versus nearly-even schedules.
A&M has a +50 point differential in 6 games.
Florida has a +95 point diff in 6 games.
That's a little surprising - Florida's is nearly double that of A&M's. But how? Well, A&M only beat Vandy by 5 points. And their win over Florida was by 3. But the biggie influencer on this stat is their loss: 28 points to Bama. A total blowout.
So while the Aggies' win over Carolina is more impressive than Florida's was, so too was Florida's win over Arkansas compared to A&M's. And Florida's only loss, to A&M, was on a last-second FG.
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No, none of this is super-important. If they both win out, Florida will get its own shot vs big, bad Bama and would then leapfrog A&M with a win. But until then, there seems to be more people using h-2-h over MOV.