After another blowout victory, where does Wake Forest stand in the College Football Playoff picture?

Sooner or later, the College Football Playoff selection committee has to start respecting Wake Forest.

Put prejudices aside. Forget the story. Just watch the matches. Does this look like 13 th the best team in the country for you?

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Certainly, for a variety of reasons, it’s difficult to say where Wake Forest stands exactly in the pecking order for this unpredictable 2026 season. It’s not their fault that the ACC has become a sad football conference and there are a bunch of teams that could also go 9-1 with this schedule.

But just look at what this team has been doing to their opponents lately – if you can stomach the carnage. Every week, Wake Forest shows up to play a football game. And every week, the team they face has unwittingly entered into a ritual of humiliation.

Of course, the strength of the schedule matters. But so does kicking ass — and in a year defined by parity across the country, no one does it as thoroughly as the Demon Deacons.

By halftime Saturday in Dallas, Wake Forest had so completely gutted SMU that one wonders why anyone — including Mustangs players — bothered to show up for the second half. At that point, the game was already 42-0, en route to a 49-7. This could have been the most lopsided game of the year between two very good teams.

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And yes, SMU was considered a pretty good team at 7-2 before it turned into a buddy for the insatiable sharks wearing gold helmets. But SMU shouldn’t feel too bad. Since visiting Louisville on September 26, Wake Forest has done just that to everyone.

In their last six games, the Deacs have outscored their opponents by a total of 313-38. Sure, there are some results that won’t move the needle as far as the playoffs (a 77-0 win over Merrimack in early November is just a statement that Wake Forest should have planned better), but 51-7 over Virginia? Beat Stanford 57-3? And then back it up at SMU with a game that actually ended well before halftime?

They’re not great or necessarily good teams, but Wake is no fluke. We should have already known this in mid-September when the Demon Deacons suffered their only loss – a very competitive 33-20 decision in Miami. Wake Forest wasn’t necessarily close to winning this game, but they looked like they could compete physically – which is crucial, since Miami is the only playoff-caliber team they’ll see all year.

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Since then, Wake Forest has done nothing but show time and time again that what happened against Miami was legitimate.

When you consistently beat conference opponents like this, even in a mediocre conference, it means you belong. And if Wake finishes the regular season at 11-1, which they most likely will with games remaining against Georgia Tech and Duke at home, they unequivocally deserve a chance to be in the postseason, no matter what happens in a potential ACC championship rematch with Miami.

But will the commission agree?

For now, they are skeptical. At 13th this week, Wake Forest was behind several two-loss teams, including BYU and Kentucky. It’s even ranked lower than one-loss Texas Tech, which was destroyed at Cincinnati and then survived fourth-quarter battles against Arizona and West Virginia.

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It’s easy to understand why. This particular committee places a high value on quality wins, and Wake Forest doesn’t have any that jump off the page. No one will say this explicitly, but after years of the SEC complaining about the strength of the schedule and not getting enough credit in the room, it appears the committee has finally been bullied into submission.

Let’s say Wake Forest wins its final two games and loses another close one to Miami in the ACC Championship Game to finish 11-2. It would be a big statement — perhaps even the kind of statement the committee wants to make about the schedule as the 24-team era approaches — if Wake Forest were excluded under these circumstances.

But it would also be an unfortunate misreading of why the playoffs were expanded in the first place.

Much like Indiana two years ago, which went 11-1 without beating a ranked team, it’s natural to wonder if the win-loss record tells an accurate story about Wake Forest. But that’s what the playoffs are for, and that’s why they were expanded a few years ago. With 12 spots available, there must be plenty of room on the field for a power conference team that has only lost to one true national title contender and has handily dominated everyone else.

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If that means a pretty good SEC team with three losses gets left out, so be it. Let Greg Sankey complain about it on Paul Finebaum’s show.

In general, the committee’s problem is that it cannot just do one thing or evaluate one measure. The college football season is a large puzzle made up of many different sized pieces.

You can’t just focus on win-loss records, because schedules are important and they vary wildly from conference to conference, and you’ll inevitably end up with teams that don’t belong there. But you can’t either just focus on the strength of the schedule, because winning games should also count. And you can’t just focus on head-to-heads, because if you apply that principle to every team comparison you’ll end up in a mental pretzel.

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The truth is that the committee’s job is to pull on each of these threads a little bit and make some very difficult decisions. Releasing these rankings every week when they have a very incomplete data set opens them up to constant criticism because, inevitably, the logic used to rank one team over another will not apply to a different ranking.

This makes the committee look incoherent and insane, but in reality it makes it normal. Sometimes the unsatisfactory answer comes down to: “We think Team X did a better job than Team Y at managing their schedule.” » And that’s perfectly acceptable when there’s no real way to compare two teams that have traveled very different paths. That’s what the committee is here for: to treat the game like human beings, not like computers.

That’s also Wake Forest’s problem, though, especially in a year where there could be a scheduling backlash in the committee room: There’s no other team like them in the country. Because of their week-to-week dominance, but also because of a schedule that won’t look as good as the playoff contenders in the SEC or Big Ten, they keep the committee guessing.

Does their physicality up front, ball defense and elite offensive play in ACC games translate to national championship picture? Ultimately, unless Wake earns an automatic bid with the ACC title, it will be up to the committee to decide.

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So far, it seems like they have a lot of questions about whether this team really deserves the playoffs. But every time Wake Forest has played football for nearly two months, they’ve been shouting the answer.