Jerry Palm provides his prediction for how the penultimate CFP Rankings will look Tuesday night
7 min read
For those of you tired of seeing the same old teams in the College Football Playoff, you had a great weekend! Michigan dumped Ohio State and Oklahoma lost Bedlam to Oklahoma State, which all but eliminates the Buckeyes and definitely eliminates the Sooners. The only regular participant in the CFP that is still alive for a spot is Alabama.
This week’s penultimate CFP Rankings will go a long way toward deciding the New Year’s Six bowl bids since teams that do not play this week rarely change position relative to other teams that are also not playing.
As a reminder, here is the criteria that CFP Selection Committee members consider when building the rankings each week:
- Strength of schedule
- Conference championships (once decided)
- Head-to-head
- Results vs. common opponents
- Results vs. ranked opponents
Thankfully, the committee’s definition of “ranked opponents” is different than what you’re used to seeing. The rankings they use are the prior week’s CFP Rankings. They do not consider where teams are ranked when the games were played either in the CFP, AP Top 25, etc. Using game-time rankings is the most worthless way to determine “ranked opponents”. In fact, the committee specifically forbids the use of any poll that has a preseason starting point.
There are also criteria that are not specifically listed and will likely never be said out loud by anyone. Those include things like margin of victory. Teams cannot always control their strength of schedule, but they can take strides to make up for a weak one by dominating the opponents they do face.
Also, when it comes to game control, the cat is no longer in the bag. Despite telling me at a mock selection meeting in October that game control was something the committee never discussed, they are now openly talking about it again. Last week, chairman Gary Barta was asked how much the committee takes a team’s ability to control games into account.
“Well, each team has a little bit different style, obviously. Controlling wins, if you think about watching games, that’s more important than just a team that’s just running up the score in my opinion,” he said. “And I think we talked in the committee, when a team has total control of a game, that might be defensively, it might be offensively, so it’s certainly something that we watch. But every team is so different in their style that it just sort of depends on the team.”
So, while it may not simply be a matter of piling on points, it is still better to build an early lead than a late one, even if the result is the same. However, there is no actual game control statistic. It is strictly an eye-test thing.
With that in mind, here is how I expect the CFP Rankings to look upon their release Tuesday night.
Note: This prediction is based only on results to this point. It does not reflect the final projection for the playoff. The complete bowl playoff and bowl projections through the end of the season can be found here.
