The season’s first College Football Playoff rankings will be unveiled tonight, and they’re a bit meaningful. They aren’t an end-all-be-all, no, so it’s fair for those who are annoyed by the breathless response to them to express that annoyance, but they’re also a big look at how the committee’s thinking, so it’s fair to respond a little breathlessly. We have a solid general idea of how the committee thinks, but it isn’t the same every year, and it isn’t the same with every team, and the exercise is extraordinarily subjective, making what the committee thinks an important ingredient, and therefore tonight an important marker.
There’s one big question tonight, with a few smaller questions attached to it, and we’ll say two other smaller questions floating around independently.
The big question is where the committee will place Cincinnati. That’s the most impactful thing we’ll find out. We have a model that projects the committee’s rankings based on these last seven years of committee thoughts, reflected through final rankings, and that model recognizes that Group of Five teams receive a discount from the committee, and not a good kind of discount. Not a family discount. It’s a bad discount. A Group of Five discount. We aren’t saying whether this is fair or unfair—since Power Five teams play mostly Power Five teams and Group of Five teams play mostly Group of Five teams, some discount is reasonable. But last year, the discount was particularly large, and while you could chalk that up to fewer nonconference games than usual, I’m not sure that explanation actually holds. Last year’s committee made some of the weirder decisions in committee history, and they did them in a way that held down Group of Five schools, which only adds to tonight’s uncertainty. Cincinnati has one of the best wins in the country so far by the variables by which our model measures, which are margin, opponent, and location. Will that hold up? Or will the committee move the goalposts again?
There are then the smaller questions that attach themselves to Cincinnati, the first of which directly ties into how good of a win that best win of theirs really is. Where will the committee rank Notre Dame? The Irish have just one loss—the Cincinnati one—and they’re traditionally treated as a Power Five school. They also have no impressive wins, and plenty of eyebrow-raising wins in the bad way. Uncertainty abounds. The higher Notre Dame is ranked, the better for Cincinnati, especially because Notre Dame has one of the easiest paths to 11-1 of anyone left in the sport.
Beyond the Notre Dame question, look for whether Houston and SMU crack the field. Each has just one loss, but Houston’s was to a mediocre Texas Tech and SMU’s was to Houston, and making matters worse, neither has any sort of impressive win to their name. This won’t affect the committee’s present impression of Cincy—the Bearcats have played neither—but a potential ranked opponent remaining on the schedule is a big deal.
Moving on from Cincinnati, there are two questions left.
The first is where Alabama will fall given its loss at Texas A&M. The committee’s rankings aren’t as much of a horse race as the AP Poll, but there’s a horse race element inherent to college football, and a big season-long question looming is whether an 11-2 Alabama, hypothetically losing to Georgia in the SEC Championship, could make the cut over a one-loss Power Five team, a one-loss Power Five conference champion, or an undefeated Cincinnati, which I guess means this isn’t all that independent from the Bearcats after all. Getting an idea of how the committee views the Tide will help us on this.
The second is where Ohio State and Oregon line up with respect to each other. Oregon has the head-to-head win, and it came in Columbus, but the Ducks also therefore have the worse loss, having fallen at Stanford in overtime. Neither has looked extraordinarily impressive on the year, but Ohio State’s shown flashes of it against their weaker foes, whereas Oregon’s really only shown it in that win over the Buckeyes. How the two compare isn’t guaranteed to hold up, even in the chalkiest of scenarios—Ohio State has more meat left on its schedule than Oregon does. Still, it’ll be telling, and it’ll be interesting in the meta sense because it’ll give us some hint into how and when head-to-head matters.
Again, this isn’t an end-all-be-all. It’s a starting point. But it’s going to tell us a lot. Especially about how the committee views Cincinnati.
