The muddled middle of these rankings might make mincemeat of a middling argument.
At the end of a rather dizzying question-and-answer game on the College Football Playoff ranking show Tuesday night, CFP chairman and Arkansas athletics director Hunter Yurachek was asked, less succinctly, will the selection committee change its top-25 rankings after this weekend’s slate of conference championship games?
“Following the championship games, we will re-rank the top-25 teams, and we’ll see where they fall,” he said.
See. There.
We’re arguing about the merit of teams ranked behind No. 8 Oklahoma while Yurachek and the committee continue to tell us who they think are the 25 best teams in the country. This includes the 12 they get to place into a bracket to crown a national champion, while they aren’t even sure about all the teams they’ve ranked.
So Sunday will act as a pencils-down exercise for a boardroom full of people who I trust less with an eye test than Snake Plissken and Nick Fury — combined.
Here are my takeaways from the latest College Football Playoff rankings:
1. The ACC is the CFP selection committee’s favorite Group of 6 conference.
What the committee does seem sure about is that it kind of loathes the ACC. I hope someone loves me as much as the selection committee loves 8-4 Iowa. Not a single top-25 win is present on the Hawkeyes’ resume, and their best win is a 41-3 blowout of Minnesota (7-5). Kirk Ferentz’s Hawkeyes sit sixth in the Big Ten standings, which puts them on equal footing with Illinois and Washington — two teams that could’ve easily been slotted here, but, like Iowa, shouldn’t be.
If the committee liked ACC football, perhaps ranking Duke (7-5) at No. 22 instead of Iowa might’ve been a way to hedge against perhaps having to box out the ACC entirely as only the highest-ranked conference champions — not Power 4 champions — would’ve allowed the committee and ACC to save face.
Instead, the committee opted to go get the nuclear launch codes. With this ranking, potential ACC champion Duke might not make the CFP but potential Sun Belt champ No. 25 James Madison? Or No. 24 North Texas? Or even No. 20 Tulane. Those are options. And that’s just the Group of 6 teams.
In a kinder world, a less petty one, I’d tell you this is a play to get an ACC member, say No. 12 Miami, into the CFP. But seeing as the selection committee has turned down every opportunity it has had to rank Miami ahead of Notre Dame — a team it beat in Week 1 and holds the same record of 10-2 — I would not expect this committee to include the ACC in its CFP, unless Virginia finishes its best season since 1989 with its best season ever and first 11-win season.
2. The coziest spot in the sport is ranked No. 5 to No. 8.
No team feels as comfortable as those ranked just behind No. 2 Indiana and just in front of No. 10. They’re enjoying an extra bye week before finding out who exactly and where exactly they will play in the first or second round of the College Football Playoff.
I contend that is the most beneficial position in the sport. Not only do you stand a chance of playing at home unlike the top-4 seeds in the sport, which feels wildly unfair to No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 and No. 4, but you’re likely going to face an opponent rested just enough to feel fresh but sat still for so long as to lose form.
In last year’s CFP, two teams that began with home games played for the national championship, three played in the semifinal matchups and neither of the top-2 seeds in the sport made it past the semifinals stage. This leads me to the rest of this takeaway.
What about Alabama and Notre Dame?
Kalen DeBoer and Alabama play for an SEC Championship against Georgia on Saturday. (Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
Back to you, Hunter Yurachek!
“I will tell you the debate between Alabama and Notre Dame over the past three weeks has been one of the strongest debates we’ve had in the room for the past two years that I’ve been a member of the committee. I think this week, as we looked at those two teams and how closely they have been over the past three weeks, Notre Dame went on the road, had a strong win at Stanford.
“But Alabama went on the road in a rivalry game, looked really good, especially in the first half, getting up 17-0, ran the ball well. Auburn came back at them. They had a great gutsy call on 4th-and-2 late in the third quarter to get a touchdown, and then got the turnover late in that game. And I think that was enough to change the minds of a couple of committee members to push Alabama up ahead of Notre Dame in this week’s rankings.”
That’s a lot of talking to say: We think the only team to beat Georgia at Sanford in six years is better than the team that lost to Texas A&M at home. I’d speechwrite for you, Yurachek, but I like my current job.
3. The current 12-team CFP is showing its weakness — like a quarter-mile crack in the Hoover Dam
Some of this was fixed — we think, or SEC commissioner Greg Sankey hopes — with the move to straight seeding. No doubt seeing Arizona State and Boise State at No. 9 and No. 12 in the selection committee rankings but elevated to the No. 3 and No. 4 seeds — because it’s the format Sankey and the CFP board of managers agreed to in the first place — was jarring.
Now, the hope is that it doesn’t happen again, and the matchups feel fairer. And by “fairer” I mean weighted to the highest-ranked team instead of, say, No. 6 seed Ohio State making pâté out of the No. 1 seed Ducks. We’ll see how it works out in 2025.
As I wrote earlier, the College Football Playoff format is flawed in its current state: The only programs with a chance to make the CFP are those ranked inside this selection committee’s top 25. With a sport that has 136 teams — and I’ve ranked them all once this season already — we simply need a bigger bracket, a larger canvas, for some programs to continue to play through what could be not just the most memorable season in their respective histories but in the sport’s too.
Here’s what I wrote:
In the 24-team model proposed and gaining traction, there are as many as 31 teams still in play even during this first weekend of the postseason.Instead, we’re staring at seven programs that appear safely positioned in the 12-team field — a far narrower group than the sport could offer. And imagine the alternative: a playoff with 16 potential home games. Notre Dame Stadium, Bryant-Denny Stadium and Michigan Stadium are just a few of the venues that could deliver some of the sport’s most electric postseason atmospheres, especially with national-title stakes at their peak.Another shortcoming of the 12-team format is how 10-win Power 4 teams like Miami, Vanderbilt and Utah can still be left out of a tournament they’ve genuinely earned the right to play in — particularly in seasons that may be among their most memorable.
Add Texas to this list but only because Yurachek made one thing very clear about the Longhorns’ argument for selection into the CFP.
“It’s not that Texas lost to Ohio State — it is that Texas lost to Florida that’s holding them back.”
See that, kiddos? It’s not who you beat. It’s who you lose to that matters most.
4. Leaving Ole Miss at No. 6 is fine.
Lane Kiffin exiting like that is not.
Y’all act like we haven’t watched this man’s movies for two decades. Like this isn’t the man Al Davis warned Tennessee about, and they still hired him, and he still made them look foolish. I mean Al Davis called Kiffin a “professional liar.” Al Davis called him that.
Lane Kiffin took the head coach position at LSU after six seasons at Ole Miss. (Photo by Jason Homan/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Yes, Ole Miss should be left at No. 6. If you think Lane Kiffin no longer being a part of a team that is preparing for its first trip to the CFP is that big of an impediment to its ability to win the national championship, just tell me you’re an LSU fan and don’t waste any more of my time. The man betrayed the values of the sport that he and his coaching brethren claim are sacrosanct: He looked at a team he coached to 11-1, four games from winning the National Championship and left them for a big pile of money.
I don’t want to hear one more word from anyone who would like to tell me winning a championship matters more to coaches and should matter more to players. Kiffin’s one more example of just what isn’t true: Coaches are no more loyal to programs and universities than the players they recruit. Those are the ethics the sport is running on.
But I refuse to penalize a group of people, including players, coaches and countless support staff and people at Ole Miss who helped make this season into a success because Monte Kiffin’s kid did what he has done at the Oakland Raiders, Tennessee, Alabama and Ole Miss — make a mess in someone else’s house. The problem with that? He’s never been told to clean it up.
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