Calculating Texas Tech football wins needed for College Football Playoff at-large bid

This season, the College Football Playoff (CFP) is going to be more inclusive than ever now that it has expanded from just four teams to twelve. That means that more teams have hopes of playing for a National Championship. Of course, Texas Tech would love to be invited to that party.

There are two paths Tech could take to get to the CFP. First, the Red Raiders could win the Big 12 Championship and earn an automatic bid. If that doesn't happen, though, Joey McGuire's team could still earn one of the seven at-large bids that will be handed out.

The first scenario, Texas Tech winning the Big 12, would be preferred but given that Tech hasn't won an outright conference championship since 1955, that seems like a pipe dream, especially since the Red Raiders were picked only 9th in the conference preseason poll.

On the other hand, an at-large bid also seems like a far-fetched idea. That's because the program would have to have a nearly perfect regular season to make it to the CFP as an at-large participant.

Recently, Kelly Ford, who is know for compiling college football power rankings and resume rankings posted on social media an estimation of how many games each program in the country would have to win in the regular season in order to earn an at-large bid.

Placing each program in tiers based on how many wins would be needed, he took into consideration the difficulty of each program's schedule. Thus, one team's ten-win season might be more impressive in the eyes of the selection committee than another team's eleven-win season given the caliber of opponents each team faced.

Ford estimates that Tech would need to win eleven regular-season games to get an at-large bid in this year's playoff. Such a run would be historic for the Red Raiders because it would almost certainly mean that the program would play in the Big 12 Championship Game for the first time. But is that dream even possible for this year's team?

Where would 11 wins come from for Texas Tech?

First, let's face the reality of what an eleven-win season would mean for the Red Raiders. To say that it would be historic would be an understatement.

In program history, Tech has only three eleven-win seasons (1953, 1973, and 2008). What's more, the only time the program rattled off 11 wins in the regular season was in 2008 (that's because in 1953 and 1973 the team played only 10 regular-season games).

This year, eleven wins would mean that Tech would drop only one game in the regular season. Now, the Red Raiders do have one of the easiest schedules in the Big 12, but that still seems like an incredibly difficult task.

First of all, the Red Raiders would have to go 7-0 at home. That seems possible given that the toughest teams to come to Lubbock this fall will be Baylor, Colorado, or West Virginia. Only one of those teams, the Mountaineers, managed to put forth a winning season in 2023.

On the road, Tech would have to be much better than it has been during the McGuire era which has seen Tech go just 3-8 combined away from home in the past two seasons. Thus, to get to eleven regular-season wins, Tech would have to go 4-1 against, Washington State, Arizona, TCU, Iowa State, and Oklahoma State.

Beating the Wildcats, Cyclones, and Cowboys would seem to be the most difficult task that Tech will face on the road this year. What's more, TCU is always a tough place to play for the Red Raiders given the rivalry between the two schools.

To be honest, eleven regular-season wins seem highly unlikely for Tech. In fact, the more realistic path to the playoff might be for Tech to win nine or ten games in the regular season and then capture the Big 12 title.

Either way, the path to the CFP for the Red Raiders is narrow. That's why this team has to take each week as it comes and worry about stacking wins one at a time rather than thinking about the challenge of doing what few teams in program history have ever managed to do.