We had to wait an extra 45 minutes because of a November basketball game being played outside the continental United States, but hey, the College Football Playoff Poll did eventually come.
Without any top-10 teams going down in a chalky Week 13, there weren’t expected to be major shakeups near the top of the rankings. That proved to be true, outside of Ole Miss dropping to No. 7 and Oregon moving up to No. 6 after a win against USC.
Here were the SEC teams in the field:
These were the top takeaways from Tuesday night’s (delayed) reveal:
No. 14 Vandy and No. 16 Texas are in need of an apocalypse to make the field
Does that sound grim? It’s reality. That’s a tougher reality to accept for a Vanderbilt team who could go into No. 19 Tennessee, win, and still be well on the outside looking in at 10-2. The Commodores haven’t had their wins age as well as they could’ve hoped. Beating 7-4 teams like Mizzou and LSU isn’t being valued by the selection committee, and whooping a 5-win Kentucky squad kept the Dores in the same exact No. 14 spot.
At this point, it’s a forgone conclusion that the No. 10 seed (currently Alabama) will be the last team in the field once the ACC champ and Group of 5 champ are crowned. With that in mind, look at the teams around Vandy and Texas with their respective matchups this weekend (spreads via BetMGM):
- No. 7 Ole Miss: 7.5-point favorite at Mississippi State
- No. 8 Oklahoma: 10-point favorite vs. LSU
- No. 9 Notre Dame: 32.5-point favorite at Stanford
- No. 10 Alabama: 5.5-point favorite at Auburn
- No. 11 BYU: 17.5-point favorite vs. UCF
- No. 12 Miami (FL): 6.5-point favorite at No. 22 Pitt
- No. 13 Utah: 12.5-point favorite at Kansas
Think of how difficult it would be for Vandy to jump to No. 10, knowing that 4 of those teams 10-13 are favored, and 2 of them are double-digit favorites. On top of that, the last team in, Alabama, has the head-to-head vs. Vandy, which means the Dores likely aren’t doing anything that can best the 10-2 Tide.
What if Texas beats 11-0 Texas A&M by 30, you ask? Well, it’ll still have 3 losses in a field that’s currently got 7 2-loss teams that are currently ranked higher.
At this point, it might take 2 apocalypses for Vandy and Texas to make the field.
Can the selection committee just admit it messed up that first Miami ranking? What are we doing here?
Have you ever been in a situation in which someone got way too angry at someone and everyone in the room immediately realized it was a massive overreaction? That’s what it feels like the selection committee did with Miami (FL) in that first Playoff ranking. By starting the Canes at No. 18 and 8 spots behind fellow 2-loss Notre Dame, who lost to Miami in the season opener, the selection committee had a massive overreaction.
We know that to be true because each week, the selection committee has moved Miami up 1-3 spots. That was for beating the likes of Syracuse (3-8), NC State (6-5) and Virginia Tech (3-8). It wasn’t exactly a gauntlet that got the Canes back up to No. 12.
The irony is that the selection committee claimed that Miami and Notre Dame didn’t have the head-to-head valued because their résumés — with the same amount of losses — were too far apart. Now, with Miami just 3 spots behind Notre Dame for beating nobody of true relevance, the selection committee might actually have to look at the game that the 2 teams played against one another. Imagine that.
The most maddening part of the selection show was listening to the ESPN analysts talk about their mutual opponents and how that’ll be big for the selection committee. You know what else should be big? A mutual opponent of each other … in a real game. Instead of just casually sliding Miami back up the rankings, the selection committee should’ve just admitted that it overreacted and apologized.
Wishful thinking.
Should Ole Miss be worried?
Ask that question in Oxford these days and 99.9% of the responses would be related to Lane Kiffin. Here, we’re talking Playoff.
After dropping Ole Miss to No. 7 after Oregon beat USC, it’s a question I find myself asking after thinking that a bid was safe. Losing to Mississippi State as a 7.5-point favorite would drop Kiffin’s squad to 10-2, which in theory, should be safe knowing that it has the Oklahoma win. If OU is in at 10-2, one would think that Ole Miss has a buffer of sorts.
But I just got through saying that the head-to-head with Miami and Notre Dame didn’t seem to matter. Are we sure that the selection committee, who has Ole Miss and Oklahoma separated by just 1 spot now, would default to that? I’m not. Ole Miss has just 2 wins vs. Power Conference bowl teams. Go figure that the Tulane win has aged better than the LSU win. And for what it’s worth, FanDuel still has Ole Miss at -500 to make the Playoff. Make of that what you will.
Kiffin insists that his team won’t be distracted. If his team somehow lost in Starkville and missed out of a Playoff bid, it would sting even worse than last year’s exclusion.
We’re setting up for a whole lot of 10-win teams who’ll miss the Playoff
Going into the 12-team Playoff era, the thinking was that getting to 10 wins would guarantee a bid. Last year, we watched Miami and BYU miss the field with 10-2 records.
Heading into the final weekend of the regular season, it’s not crazy to think that we could see all these teams get to 10 wins and get left out of the Playoff:
- 10-3 BYU (would include Big 12 Championship loss)
- 10-2 Miami
- 10-2 Utah
- 10-2 Vandy
- 10-2 Virginia
And that’s assuming teams like Michigan (9-2) and Georgia Tech (9-2) don’t take down top-4 teams on Saturday. We shouldn’t rule that out, either.
That’s a wild thought on a variety of levels. A year removed from hearing all the crying from 9-3 SEC teams like Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina, those 9-3 marks aren’t even sniffing those arguments this year. It’s a week-to-week, year-to-year sport.
Somewhere, the college football purists are smiling wide knowing this 12-team Playoff is looking much closer to a double-elimination regular season than originally expected.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
