The College Football Playoff committee threw a bit of a curveball Tuesday night - and Alabama was on the receiving end of some cautiously good news. The Crimson Tide jumped up to No. 9 in the latest rankings, sliding ahead of Notre Dame, which dropped to No.
- It’s a small shift, but in the high-stakes world of playoff positioning, every spot counts.
But before Alabama fans start celebrating, it’s worth noting that this move doesn’t come with any guarantees. Committee chairman Hunter Yurachek made that clear. The Tide may have climbed a spot, but their future still hinges on what happens in Saturday’s SEC Championship Game against Georgia - and how the committee interprets it.
“I can't answer that question until I watch the game on Saturday and see how Alabama plays versus Georgia,” Yurachek said during a media call. “It's impossible for me - and the committee - to predict what could happen with a win or a loss. They've got another great opportunity, another metric that other teams do not have.”
Translation: Alabama’s fate is still very much in its own hands - and possibly in the hands of others, too.
Yurachek, who also serves as Arkansas’ athletic director, didn’t offer any predictions or promises, but he did make one thing clear: this weekend’s conference championship games could shake up the rankings across the board, even for teams that aren’t playing.
That’s a shift from last year’s approach. In 2024, then-chairman Warde Manuel said idle teams wouldn’t move relative to each other during championship weekend.
This year? That’s no longer the case.
According to Yurachek, the CFP’s management committee clarified in the offseason that idle teams can move depending on what happens in the title games.
“Idle teams can move based on the results of the championship games,” Yurachek said on ESPN Tuesday night. “There may be something that happens in a championship game that impacts an idle team, whether that's their strength of schedule or some other datapoint that we use, or there could be a team that suffers a significant loss in a title game.”
That’s a key detail for Alabama. While their climb to No. 9 gives them a bit more breathing room - especially if they lose to Georgia - it also means teams like Notre Dame (No. 10) and Miami (No. 12), who aren’t playing this weekend, aren’t locked in place. If Alabama stumbles hard in Atlanta, the door is open for those idle teams to leapfrog them.
And while the Tide’s current ranking gives them a slight cushion - say, if No. 11 BYU wins the Big 12 title and makes a push - nothing is set in stone. The committee will reevaluate everything after the dust settles on Saturday.
“Each of the championship games will just give us another game and another datapoint to evaluate the teams that participate in those championship games and the idle teams around them,” Yurachek said. “We'll rerank the teams one last time this weekend, and the five highest ranked conference champions and the seven highest ranked at-large teams will advance to the College Football Playoff.”
In other words, this weekend is a clean slate. Every team, whether playing or not, is going to be judged one final time - and Alabama’s performance against Georgia will be front and center.
Yurachek wouldn’t commit to what the committee needs to see from Alabama to keep them in the mix. But he did acknowledge that a win would obviously speak volumes. Anything less, and it becomes a matter of how the Tide look in defeat - and how the rest of the weekend plays out.
“It’s hard to look ahead to say what we need to see from them,” he said. “The easiest thing to see from them would be a win, obviously. But we will judge all of the conference championship games when they are completed, the results of them, and then rank the teams 1 through 25 accordingly.”
Bottom line: Alabama’s in a solid position right now, but Saturday is make-or-break. Beat Georgia, and they’ve got a compelling case.
Lose - especially badly - and they’re at the mercy of the committee’s final reranking. Either way, the Tide have one last shot to make their case.