The 1st Edition of the College Football Playoff rankings were released this evening.. a look at the Top 10:
1. Georgia
2. Alabama
3. Notre Dame
4. Clemson
5. Oklahoma
6. Ohio State
7. Penn State
8. TCU
9. Wisconsin
10. Miami

Kudos to the committee for ignoring the AP poll and rewarding the teams with quality wins. In the long run it doesn’t matter, but for now Georgia is ahead of Alabama for #1, as the Dawgs have the best win of any team – over #3 Notre Dame. Tide certainly pass the eye test, but don’t have many quality wins. That will change in coming weeks though. Notre Dame has 3 wins over current Top 25 teams, all by big margins and is the highest ranked 1 loss team. Clemson’s loss is against mediocre Syracuse, but has 6 wins over teams that are .500 or over – most of anyone. OU over Ohio State as the committee didn’t forget the early season dominant win by the Sooners in Columbus.
I expected that Wisconsin and Miami would be much lower in the committee rankings than in the old fashioned AP poll, which continues to focus solely on record and doesn’t look at anything else. The committee noted that Wisconsin and Miami has no wins over ranked teams, although Miami has two monster games coming up.
Of course, this is just the first set of rankings. In the past 3 years, just 1, 2 and 2 of the initial Top 4 made the playoffs, and in two of the three years, a team outside the top 10 in the first rankings, was in the final four at the end.