Over the next six days, there’s going to be a lot of speculation about the College Football Playoff Rankings. It won’t stop once the first rankings are announced, of course—the process of ranking teams that have only played one, two, or three games amongst those who’ve played nine, ten, or eleven (ok, not eleven—Texas State won’t be in consideration) is going to leave a lot of room open for guessing, opining, and arguing over the next seven days. And so on. And so forth. It will be loud. It will, at times, be infuriating. It will, at other times, inspire apathy.
So, as we embark on this short journey, a reminder:
Arguing about where teams should be ranked is reasonable, and can be fun if you’re into that kind of thing. Compelling arguments can be made on either side of even an Oregon vs. Texas A&M debate. But arguing about where teams will be ranked is silly. It might still be fun, and go ahead if it is. But you don’t know. And I don’t know. And pundits don’t know.
Most years, we’re able to forecast the rankings with some level of confidence. There’s a good bit of precedent to go off of by now, six years into the CFP experiment. But there is no precedent for comparing, say, a Utah team that’s just bludgeoned USC (if that happens) to a Georgia team that’s proven not quite a match for good competition. There are metrics (losses, adjusted margin of victory, best wins) that can be employed that have predictive power, but the totality of the thing is too vague to make any sort of reasonable projection. After Tuesday? Sure. We’ll have some guidance. But in the immediate term, watch and wait, and if you want to argue, know that you don’t know. We all don’t know.
