Ohio State gets top billing in opening College Football Playoff rankings; Indiana, Texas A&M next
By EDDIE PELLS AP National Writer
Ohio State received top billing in the first College Football Playoff rankings of the season Tuesday, followed by Indiana, Texas A&M and Alabama.
The top three head into the final four weeks of the regular season undefeated. Another team with no losses, BYU of the Big 12, was ranked seventh.
At No. 5 was Georgia, followed by Mississippi. All of the top six came from either the Big Ten or Southeastern Conference — a dose of business as usual despite a season that has been anything but predictable.
This marked the first of six weekly rankings the 12-person playoff committee will release this season, ending Dec. 6 when the final list will set the bracket for college football’s 12-team playoff.
That tournament begins Dec. 19-20 with four games on the campus of seeds No. 5-8. The top four seeds play winners of those games over the New Year holiday and the title game is set for Jan. 19 at Hard Rock Stadium outside Miami.
Texas Tech was ranked eighth and Oregon came in at No. 9. Rounding out the top 12 were Notre Dame — the only team in the Top 25 not from a power conference — then Texas and Oklahoma.
But if the bracket were set based on these rankings, the Longhorns and Sooners would miss out — bumped by No. 14 Virginia of the ACC and Memphis of the American. That’s thanks to a rule that places the five best-ranked conference champions into the bracket even if they’re not in the top 12.
Memphis wasn’t among the committee’s top 25 but was still the highest ranked leader in a Group of 5 conference.
Still holding out hope are teams such as 16th-ranked Vanderbilt and 17th-ranked Georgia Tech, each of whom spent time in the AP Top 10 this season thanks to upsets that turned college football upside down through September and October.
Tweaks in this year’s bracket
The biggest change in the setup of this year’s bracket was eliminating the first-round bye for the four best conference champions. It would mean that Virginia, instead of jumping from a No. 14 ranking to a No. 3 seed, would be seeded 11th with a road game against Mississippi.
It would also place the SEC’s best team, Texas A&M, one spot behind Indiana. The ranking of the top three undefeateds was among the most anticipated decisions coming from the committee. They ended up placing them in the same order as voters in this week’s AP Top 25.
It left questions as to how much weight the committee will give to strength of schedule: A&M’s was 18 notches higher than Ohio State’s and 24 higher than Indiana’s.
“We felt like a separator there was defensively, and Ohio State and Indiana were better defensively,” said committee chair Mack Rhoades, the athletic director at Baylor.
Rhoades also spent time discussing Oregon, which was ranked sixth in the AP poll but ninth in the playoff rankings. The Ducks’ best win this year was a 20-point victory over Northwestern.
“When we looked at and evaluated Oregon, we really looked at the quality of the team and how they looked on film,” Rhoades said.
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