Never say never when it comes to the College Football Playoff rankings. But if CFP chair Warde Manuel is to be believed, there won’t be any movement among teams who are not playing on conference championship weekend.
The committee revealed its next-to-last set of rankings on Tuesday night and vaulted three-loss Alabama ahead of two-loss Miami for what is provisionally the final at-large spot in the 12-team field. The Crimson Tide beat 5-7 Auburn in Week 14 while Miami blew a 21-point first-half lead in a 42-38 loss at a 9-3 Syracuse team that jumped into the rankings on Tuesday.
CFP chair Warde Manuel said on ESPN’s rankings show that the committee moved Alabama ahead of Miami in part because the Tide are 3-1 against teams currently ranked in the playoff’s top 25 and Miami is 0-1. And in his post-show news conference Tuesday night, Manuel, the Michigan athletic director, made it pretty clear that evaluations of teams that aren’t playing on Friday or Saturday aren’t going to change with a few more days of reflection citing No. 7 Tennessee and No. 9 Indiana.
“If you take, for example, Tennessee is ahead of [ACC title game participant] SMU, Indiana is behind SMU; Tennessee will not drop below Indiana at any point. Neither team is playing” Manuel said. “But SMU could move up, depending on how we evaluate the game. They could stay where they are or they could move down depending on the outcome of the game. But Tennessee and Indiana in this example would never flip. Indiana would never move. Ahead of Tennessee and Tennessee would never drop below Indiana because we’ve already evaluated them. There’s not another datapoint because they’re not playing in the championship games. So we don’t have anything else to add to the evaluation of those teams, so we can’t move them above or below each other.”
By that reasoning, Miami’s playoff hopes are toast barring an unexpected blowout loss for a team like Penn State or Georgia in their conference title games on Saturday that somehow drops one or both teams below the Hurricanes. There’s little reason for Hurricanes fans to be optimistic.
We are now in the 11th year of the playoff process and we’ve witnessed some odd decisions from the committee before the final week of the regular season. The first year of the four-team playoff was infamous for the way that TCU moved from No. 3 to No. 6 despite a win. And last year, Florida State fell out of the playoff despite winning the ACC title game because of Jordan Travis’ season-ending injury.
The committee though, has been pretty consistent lately when it comes to teams who aren’t in conference championship games. There was a lot of movement a season ago in the final set of rankings, but that all came from teams who played. Ohio State, Missouri and Penn State were the top three teams in the rankings who weren’t in title games. Their order didn’t change over the final two rankings.
In 2022, Alabama, Tennessee and Penn State were the top three non-title contending teams. They stayed in that order in the final set of rankings.
However, it’s imperative to note that Alabama is far from a lock to make the playoff. SMU is a 2.5-point favorite against Clemson in the ACC title game. If the Tigers win, they’ll get the ACC’s automatic playoff spot and SMU will be 11-2. In that scenario, SMU could end up taking the last at-large playoff spot ahead of both Alabama and Miami and render this whole discussion moot.
But Manuel did leave open the possibility that SMU drops below Alabama as well. If you’re wanting to keep Alabama out of the playoff for whatever reason, you’re rooting for Clemson on Saturday night. And you probably want the Tigers to win by a late field goal.
“Potentially, yes,” Manuel said when asked directly if SMU could drop below Alabama on Sunday. “And they can move above teams, as well. Again, it just depends on the outcome of the game.”