Despite a 7-1 conference record, USF is not playing in Saturday’s American championship game. They lost a tiebreaker to 7-1 Temple, who faces 7-1 Navy in Annapolis.
While it’s not unheard of for this to happen, it is pretty unusual. We went back through FBS history and counted up every instance where a team went 7-1 or better in their conference and did not make their conference championship game. This data goes back to 1992, when the SEC was the first to split into divisions and host a championship game. It covers every league in FBS except the Big East (which never had a championship game) and the Sun Belt (which has not yet had one).