The first College Football Playoff rankings came out, and once again Alabama walked out looking like the committee’s favorite child.
That’s the through line here. The Crimson Tide are 5th in the opening rankings despite two losses, and that placement puts them ahead of every other SEC team not named Georgia, as well as undefeated UCLA, one-loss BYU, Notre Dame and Wake Forest. It’s the latest example of the committee seeming to give Alabama the benefit of the doubt, and it doesn’t square with how the season has played out so far.
To this point, Alabama has been treated like a team whose résumé keeps getting polished after the fact. The committee has done it before.
Last year, the Tide climbed after a close win over 5-7 Auburn and then stayed put even after losing the SEC championship game by three touchdowns, which was enough to get them into the 12-team bracket. In 2023, Alabama jumped undefeated Florida State for the final spot in the last four-team field.
This time, the ranking feels even harder to justify. Alabama has wins over No.
6 Kentucky and No. 21 South Carolina, but the comparison to Texas is where the logic starts to wobble.
Texas is also 2-loss, but the Longhorns have wins over No. 10 Mississippi, No.
12 Ohio State and No. 13 Tennessee.
The head-to-head comparison doesn’t help Alabama either: Texas beat Tennessee by three on the same field where Alabama lost by 16. The only other common opponent is Mississippi State, and both teams handled that game comfortably.
The bigger picture from Tuesday night is that the committee appears to be leaning hard into strength of schedule. That explains a lot of the early bracket, including why 8-0 UCLA sits as a No. 8 seed, why 7-1 Notre Dame is slotted as a No. 11 seed on the road, and why 7-1 Wake Forest is all the way down at No. 16, behind every two-loss SEC team except Missouri. If the committee is going to make SOS the main currency, then the SEC is getting exactly what it has pushed for over the years.
Still, that doesn’t mean every ranking makes sense. Alabama being ahead of Texas is the clearest example of the committee stretching its logic. The Tide are being treated like a top-five team when, at this stage, they look like part of the same crowded SEC pack trying to claw into the bracket alongside Mississippi, Tennessee, Missouri and LSU.
That’s part of why this opening ranking was always going to be messy. There weren’t enough marquee nonconference games to create clean comparisons, and the SEC’s constant round of losses has made head-to-head results hard to use consistently. Kentucky is the only team in the league with more than three straight wins, and South Carolina is the only other SEC team with more than two in a row.
The good news is that the next few weeks should clear some of this up. Alabama’s trip to LSU this Saturday is a major checkpoint.
If the Tide win, the committee will have more cover for keeping them in the top five. If they lose, they’re on the edge.
The same is true for LSU. Las Vegas has Alabama, the No. 14 team in the CFP rankings, as a 5.5-point favorite over the No. 5 team.
There’s another important two-loss matchup in Missouri, where No. 7 Texas visits No.
18 Missouri. That game could reshape the middle of the bracket.
And No. 2 Georgia’s meeting with No.
10 Mississippi won’t eliminate the Bulldogs, but it could push the Rebels into a dangerous spot.
The committee’s treatment of the non-SEC teams also matters here. Some of them don’t have many chances left to beat ranked opponents, which opens the door for three-loss teams to stay alive in the bracket. The SEC has clearly changed the way the room is thinking.
Wake Forest has the narrowest path of all. The Demon Deacons need to finish strong and at least be competitive again against Miami in the ACC championship game, or just win the whole thing and remove the doubt entirely. For the Big 12, anything other than a one-loss team is going to be under pressure, though the best outcome this week would be BYU beating Utah and keeping both teams in the bracket.
The Big Ten picture is tighter, too, with just three teams in the top 18 and two in the bracket. Ohio State is being viewed differently because of the absence of star quarterback Julian Sayin, at least for now.
And Notre Dame is in a familiar spot. The Irish were the first team out last year, and this year’s setup feels awfully similar. Their game against Miami on Saturday has turned into a must-win.
For now, though, the headline is simple: Alabama has once again been granted the kind of early ranking that makes everyone else in the field work harder to catch up. Whether that holds up is another matter entirely.
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Philip Rivers has built a second football life in Alabama, coaching at St. Michael Catholic High School while guiding his son Gunner, a committed NC State quarterback, through the next step of his career. Now the former NFL quarterback and NC State standout has surfaced as a leading candidate to take over the Wolfpack program after Dave Doeren was fired, a development that ties his current Alabama stop directly to a job with major meaning in Raleigh.
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Kentucky Suddenly Has A Surprising Role In Alabamas SEC Drama
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Finebaum also pointed to Kentucky as an unexpected piece of the larger picture, another result Alabama has reason to watch closely while trying to keep its own path to the College Football Playoff alive. In a conference race where Alabama and LSU are being measured against one another, the Wildcats performance could end up shaping how the playoff conversation looks around the Tide, even before the league's biggest games finish sorting themselves out. [Read more 🡒]