The final College Football Playoff bracket won’t be made official until Sunday, when teams from across the country will find out whether or not their dreams of a national championship, faint as they may be in some cases, will remain alive.
On Tuesday, though, the playoff’s selection committee offered a revealing indication at which teams are likely to make the field and which ones will be shut out — including a couple of particularly big names with championship-winning histories.
Though it has stumbled at times in its first season under coach Kalen DeBoer, Alabama was No. 11 in the playoff committee’s latest top 25, which was unveiled Tuesday night, putting the Crimson Tide just ahead of No. 12 Miami, No. 13 Ole Miss and No. 14 South Carolina.
None of those teams are not competing in conference championship games this weekend, meaning their regular seasons and their playoff resumes are complete. But, while there’s still a scenario that could keep Alabama out of the 12-team field, the three teams directly behind it have effectively been eliminated from the playoff.
Much of the attention was focused on Alabama, with a 9-3 record, coming in ahead of 10-2 Miami, which was No. 6 in last week’s rankings but dropped six spots following a 42-38 loss last Saturday at a Syracuse team that’s now No. 22 in the rankings.
Why, exactly, did the Crimson Tide edge out the Hurricanes?
“What it really came down to is Alabama is 3-1 against current top-25 teams and Miami is 0-1,” playoff selection committee chair Warde Manuel said in an interview with ESPN following the top 25 reveal. “Alabama is 6-1 against teams above .500 and Miami is 4-2. Both have had some losses that weren’t what they wanted out of those games, but in the last three games, Miami has lost twice. For us, in evaluating their body of work, we felt that Alabama got the edge over Miami.”
Miami began the season 9-0 and rose as high as No. 4 in the selection committee rankings before dropping two of its final three games — losses to Georgia Tech and Syracuse that were decided by a combined nine points. Behind quarterback Cam Ward, one of the top contenders for the Heisman Trophy, the Hurricanes have the FBS’s No. 1 scoring offense, averaging 44.2 points per game.
Though it doesn’t have a win over a current top-25 team, as Manuel cited, Miami does have victories against a pair of teams, Duke and Louisville, that are receiving votes in the latest US LBM Coaches Poll and have a combined record of 17-7.
Alabama owns one of the more impressive victories of the season, a 41-34 home win against then-No. 1 Georgia on September 28, but it has also lost to two 6-6 teams in Vanderbilt and Oklahoma.
While Manuel, the Michigan athletic director, said that the committee will “closely evaluate” the outcome of championship games, it will “not adjust” teams like Alabama and Miami who aren’t competing in league title games because “they don’t have another data point.”
Based on the latest rankings, it would appear as though the only outcome that could potentially knock Alabama out of the playoff would be a loss by No. 8 SMU to No. 17 Clemson in the ACC championship game. Such a result would put Dabo Swinney and the Tigers into the field while perhaps not dropping the Mustangs far enough to fall behind the Crimson Tide.
For anyone else outside of the top 11, their fates are seemingly sealed.
“Any team that is not playing right now, we don’t have a data point to rearrange where we have those teams ranked,” Manuel said. “That is set in terms of how we see them going into the final week of championship week. There’s nothing that’s going to change for us to evaluate them any differently than we have now. Those teams that are not playing cannot be adjusted in terms of where they are compared to other teams that are not playing. But the championship teams, we will evaluate that data point to determine if there needs to be any movement based on how the performance of the game goes.”