Top 10 remains same as calm takes place of chaos for week
Potential for shakeup looms as Notre Dame faces Syracuse
Seekers of treasured chaos had a hopeless night Tuesday with regard to the latest College Football Playoff rankings. The selection committee sustained its professionalism and refused any temptation for mischief when it flew to Dallas-Fort Worth, spent hours meeting and ruminating, yet still dispensed the identical top 10 teams from last week.
That surpassed the flatlining week of Nov. 25, 2014, when the committee kept the top seven teams constant from Nov. 18, the previous frivolous record.
This time, as with that time, Alabama remained No. 1, a position it has held for 15 of the 28 weeks since the four-team playoff and the weekly rankings leading to it began with the 2014 season.
Clemson (10-0) stayed at No. 2 as it has for all three rankings weeks this season. The Tigers’ 27-7 win at thenNo. 17 Boston College on Saturday couldn’t quite boost it past Alabama and its 24-0 home win against then-No. 16 Mississippi State. Clemson has appeared in the top four in 21 of the 28 listings.
From there, as with last week, came two teams that played each other on Sept. 1: No. 3 Notre Dame (10-0) and No. 4 Michigan (9-1). The Fighting Irish will have a chance to put some firm cement on that ranking Saturday when they head to Yankee Stadium to play Syracuse (8-2), which climbed a notch to No. 12.
None of the top 10 teams lost last week, a rare turn of calm in a sport often beloved for its turbulence. The highest-ranked team to lose was No. 11 Kentucky, which fell to No. 17 and to 7-3 because it lost at Tennessee. Beyond that, the only teams to lose to anyone beneath them were No. 14 North Carolina State, No. 21 Iowa and No. 23 Fresno State.
The committee omitted those from its list but proved more forgiving to No. 16 Mississippi State and No. 17 Boston College, dropping them to Nos. 21 and 20, respectively.
The previous teams at Nos. 18 and 24, Michigan State and Auburn, also lost to higher-ranked teams but vanished.
Kentucky’s loss caused another rankings milestone by enabling Central Florida (9-0) to slide upward to No. 11.
That became the highest ranking to date for any team from the second tier of the top rung of the sport, known as the Group of Five. It bested the No. 12 with which an unbeaten UCF finished last season, and the No. 12 it had held down the first two weeks of this season, much to its ambitious chagrin.
After ranking only two Group of Five teams in its first two lists, the committee brought four into the light this week: UCF, No. 23 Utah State (9-1), No. 24 Cincinnati (9-1) and No. 25 Boise State (8-2). The top-ranked Group of Five team at the end of the season receives a bid into a major New Year’s Six bowl.
Just ahead of that Group of Five trio sat the unpredictable bunch from Northwestern (6-4), which just clinched the Big Ten West Division title when it won at Iowa 14-10.
Sitting outside the top four were No. 5 Georgia (9-1), No. 6 Oklahoma (9-1), No. 7 LSU (8-2), No. 8 Washington State (9-1), No. 9 West Virginia (8-1) and No. 10 Ohio State (9-1).
Four of those six — Georgia, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Ohio State — figure to have remaining chances for emphatic statements. Georgia already has clinched passage to play Alabama in the SEC title game of Dec. 1. Oklahoma and West Virginia have a date with each other in Morgantown, W.Va., on the night after Thanksgiving, which they will reach after Oklahoma plays at home against Kansas and West Virginia visits Oklahoma State. Ohio State, after its visit to Maryland this weekend, will return home to see Michigan.
Washington State, meanwhile, holds down the highest position of any Pac-12 team, even if its cross-state rival, Washington (7-3), did just pull off a rankings curiosity. As evidence of the difficulty some voters are having filling out 25-strong rankings this year, the Huskies moved from No. 25 to No. 18 while idle this past weekend. Washington State and Washington will play each other at Pullman on Nov. 23.