Both the 12-0 Tigers and 11-1 Crimson Tide head into their conference championship games Saturday needing just a victory to lock up a playoff spot.
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The Big Ten championship game will serve as a de facto quarterfinal of the playoff, with the victor moving on to the four-team tournament.
Michigan State and Iowa will face off in the Big Ten Championship at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, IN.
On the subject of whether the two-season-old playoff ultimately could see its first conference non-champion as a playoff entry, Long said: “I don’t know how to answer that because I don’t know any of the variables of that non-champion”. The winners will play for the national title on January 11 in Glendale, Arizona. Yeah, the win over MI was fortunate but winning at Ohio State wasn’t a mistake.
For someone who wearies quickly when style points are mentioned, the preference in the Big Ten is Iowa because of coach Kirk Ferentz’s take after his Hawkeyes ran 39 fewer plays than Nebraska, failed to convert a third down, and still won.
Also out is USC, a four-time loser that plays Stanford for the Pac-12 title, and Florida, which managed only a safety last week against ACC also-ran Florida State.
But the metrics show that, like Iowa, it’s hard to find phases of the game where Michigan State truly excels, and the Spartans simply are not efficient.
Oklahoma and quarterback Baker Mayfield are the only one of the top five teams in the College Football Playoff rankings that does not have to sweat out a conference title game this weekend. Is it just their brand name or is it about how impressive they’ve looked; enough to make everyone forget about their loss to a 4-win Texas team? No muss, no fuss for a Playoff committee’s that has endured its share of criticism for the weekly rankings and Arkansas athletic director Jeff Long’s oftentimes confounding explanations.
On Tuesday night, the newest College Football Playoff Rankings were released.
The Tar Heels enter the final week of the season at No. 10 in the CFP rankings, three spots behind Stanford, which also has a chance to win its conference.
Waiting in the wings are sixth-ranked Ohio State and seventh-ranked Stanford.
The Irish were 3-2 against such teams and were one of six to play five such games, its two losses by a combined four points on the road to No. 1 Clemson and No. 7 Stanford.
There is little doubt coach Mark Dantonio has gotten this Michigan State team to exceed even the loftiest of expectations, especially in the face of a rash of injuries and after losing Pat Narduzzi, arguably the nation’s best defensive coordinator.
As the CFP standings sit now, this would be one of the semifinal matchups – potentially 13-0 Clemson taking on potentially 13-0 Iowa for the right to take on either once-beaten Alabama or once-beaten Oklahoma in the championship game.
The most likely scenario in which Ohio State could join the conversation would be for North Carolina to knock off Clemson.
But this is college football where, before the playoff – and even now with the playoff – logic has always been malleable.
The same is true for Alabama, which is 11-1 and takes on Florida in the SEC championship game Saturday.
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Tennessee, at No. 25, joined No. 20 Southern California as the second four-loss team to be ranked by the committee this season. The Buckeyes best win is at No. 15 MI. The top two teams ranked by the playoff selection committee are expected to romp to easy victories.
