College Football Playoff Rankings Released: Ohio State Claims No. 1 Spot
IRVING, Texas - Ohio State has been selected as the no. 1 team in the inaugural College Football Playoff rankings, released Tuesday by the 12-person committee. The Buckeyes are followed by Indiana, Texas A&M, and Alabama too round out the top four, setting the stage for a perhaps dramatic finish to the season.
This initial ranking is the first of six weekly releases, culminating on december 6th with the final selections that will determine the 12-team playoff bracket. The expanded playoff format,a notable shift in the landscape of college football,aims to increase access to postseason competition and heighten excitement among fans. The tournament will kick off December 19-20 with four games hosted by the teams seeded fifth through eighth. The top four seeds will receive a first-round bye, competing over the New Year holiday, with the national championship game scheduled for January 19th at Hard Rock Stadium near Miami.
Texas Tech holds the No. 8 position, with Oregon at No. 9. Notre dame, Texas, and Oklahoma complete the top 12. However,under the new playoff rules,conference champions receive automatic bids. As an inevitable result,even if ranked lower,the five highest-ranked conference champions are guaranteed a spot. Currently, this means that Texas and oklahoma would be excluded from the playoff if the season ended today, yielding spots to Virginia of the Atlantic coast Conference and Memphis of the American Athletic Conference.
Memphis currently leads all Group of 5 conferences in the rankings, despite not being in the committee’s initial top 25. teams like Vanderbilt (ranked 16th) and Georgia Tech (ranked 17th) remain hopeful, having both achieved Top 10 status in the AP Poll earlier in the season through a series of unexpected upsets.
