2. How much will the College Football Playoff committee tease Cincinnati and BYU?
(Don’t shoot the messenger … I don’t vote in this thing; I’m just telling you what I think is going to happen.)
Cincinnati and BYU aren’t going to be in the College Football Playoff.
You’re going to hear a lot of people going crazy about how high Cincinnati is, and BYU should be around the top ten, but there’s going to be a rock-hard ceiling on how high both these teams can get because neither one has a Power Five game on the schedule.
Now, that might change, and one or both of them could end up hooking up with a Pac-12 team. Even then, that might not make a difference.
Again – to be a broken record – the rankings for the next few weeks don’t matter, and it all changes up once the conference championship games are done.
Unless something insane happens, the ACC, Big Ten, and SEC champions are going to get in. That one extra spot would go to a top one-loss Power Five program that played a full slate of Power Five games over an unbeaten Group of Five team – or BYU – that didn’t even play one P5er, much less go through the weekly grind of dealing with Power Five team after Power Five team.
In a lot of ways I hope I’m wrong – even though I don’t really think it would be fair schedule-wise – and a Cincinnati or a BYU lands that fourth spot in the final rankings to get a shot in the ring with Creed.
But I’m warning you now.
It won’t be out of malice, and it won’t be because the committee is trying to come up with any sort of a PR stunt. The committee really will – most likely – decide that Cincinnati and BYU are top ten teams right now – and maybe way-close to the top four – and then change its mind in later rankings once the bigger Power Five games are played.
– What will the top 4 be?
– How will we know if the committee is on its game?
– How the heck do you rank the Pac-12 teams?
– Miami vs. Northwestern vs. Texas A&M