’Bama, Clemson, LSU, ND top first playoff list

Alabama, Clemson, LSU and Notre Dame are the top four teams in the first College Football Playoff rankings of the season.

After meeting for a day and a half at a hotel outside Dallas, the 13-member CFP selection committee yesterday released the first of its five weekly Top 25s before the four-team field is set for the College Football Playoff semifinals on Dec. 2.

Michigan is fifth, followed by Georgia and Oklahoma.

The top four teams were no surprise. The same four teams are Nos. 1-4 in the latest Associated Press poll, except with Notre Dame third and LSU fourth.

Next week’s rankings figure to be different. Four games matching top-20 teams take place Saturday, including Alabama at LSU.

Central Florida was the highest-ranked team from outside the Power Five conferences at 12th. The highest ranked team from the socalled Group of Five conferences is guaranteed a spot in the New Year’s Six bowls, but the Knights, riding a 20game winning streak, want to be included in the playoff discussion this year.

Last season they started 18th and rose to 12th by the final rankings.

Washington State was eighth, the highest-ranked Pac-12 team. Kentucky was ninth. The Wildcats host Georgia on Saturday in a game that will decide the SEC East.

Ohio State was 10th. If form holds, two of the top four teams in the first CFP ranking of the season will go on to play in the national semifinals.

Coaches began downplaying the significance of the rankings even before they were revealed on national television.

“I didn’t even know that was tonight. I didn’t realize that was going on,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart told reporters. “But I should have talked to my team about that. I didn’t bring it up to them. So who knows what they’ll be thinking tonight.”

Ranking teams is a timehonored tradition in college football, going back to first Associated Press poll in 1936. But what, if anything, can be learned from the first four years of CFP rankings?

Of the 16 teams the committee ranked in the top four of its initial rankings from 2014-17, half made the playoff. No team ranked third in the first CFP rankings has ever made the playoff.

Last season, for the first time, three teams (Georgia, Alabama, Clemson) started in the top four and finished there. Clemson was the only team to be somewhere in the top four in all six rankings from the committee.

The first committee rankings, in 2014, had just one eventual playoff team. They included three SEC teams.