Never say never when it comes to College Football Playoff rankings. But if CFP president Warde Manuel is to be believed, there won’t be any movement among teams that don’t play on conference championship weekend.
The committee revealed its next-to-last set of rankings Tuesday night and jumped three-loss Alabama ahead of two-loss Miami, making it provisionally last overall in the 12-team field. The Crimson Tide beat Auburn 5-7 in Week 14, while Miami blew a 21-point first-half lead in a 42-38 loss to a 9-3 Syracuse team that jumped up the standings on Tuesday.
CFP President Warde Manuel said on ESPN’s rankings that the committee placed Alabama ahead of Miami in part because the Tide is 3-1 against teams currently ranked in the top 25 of the playoffs and Miami is 3-1 against teams currently ranked in the top 25 of the playoffs and Miami is from 0-1. And in his post-show press conference Tuesday night, Manuel, Michigan’s athletic director, made it pretty clear that evaluations of teams that don’t play 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 we take, for example, Tennessee is ahead of SMU (a participant in the ACC title game), Indiana is behind SMU; Tennessee will not fall below Indiana at any time. Neither team plays,” Manuel said. “But SMU could move up, depending on how we evaluate the game. They could stay where they are or they could go down depending on the outcome of the game. But Tennessee and Indiana in this example would never change. Indiana would never get ahead of Tennessee and Tennessee would never fall below Indiana because we’ve already evaluated them. There is no other information because they are not playing the championship games. So we have nothing more to add to the evaluation of those teams, so we cannot move them above or below each other.”
By that reasoning, Miami’s playoff hopes are lost, barring an unexpected loss to a team like Penn State or Georgia in their conference title games on Saturday that somehow leaves one or both teams below the Hurricanes. There is little reason for Hurricanes fans to be optimistic.
We are now in the 11th year of the playoff process and we have witnessed some strange committee decisions heading into the final week of the regular season. The first year of the four-team playoffs was famous for the way TCU went from No. 3 to No. 6 despite a blowout victory. And last year, Florida State missed the playoffs despite winning the ACC title game due to Jordan Travis’ season-ending injury.
The committee, however, has been pretty consistent lately when it comes to teams not in conference championship games. There was a lot of movement a season ago in the final standings, but it all came from teams that played. Ohio State, Missouri and Penn State were the top three teams in the ranking that were not in the title games. Their order did not change in the last two rankings.
In 2022, Alabama, Tennessee and Penn State were the top three non-title teams. They remained in that order in the final standings.
However, it is imperative to note that Alabama is far from a lock to make the playoffs. SMU is a 2.5-point favorite against Clemson in the ACC title game. If the Tigers win, they will earn the ACC’s automatic playoff berth and SMU will be 11-2. In that scenario, SMU could end up taking the last overall playoff spot ahead of Alabama and Miami and making this entire discussion moot.
But Manuel left open the possibility that SMU could also fall below Alabama. If you want to keep Alabama out of the playoffs for whatever reason, you’ll root for Clemson on Saturday night. And you probably want the Tigers to win with a late field goal.
“Potentially, yes,” Manuel said when asked directly if SMU could fall below Alabama on Sunday. “And they can also outperform teams. Again, it just depends on the outcome of the game.”