If both teams win out, Baylor will be undefeated while the Irish have that loss at Clemson.
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– Big 12 mayhem 1: Oklahoma beats TCU on November 21, giving TCU two losses. The final ranking to determine the four playoff teams and major bowl lineups will come December 6 after conference championship games are played. Memphis was the top team last week, and it lost to Navy, whose only loss is to Notre Dame. Clemson is the only team in the top 25 with two wins over teams ranked within the top 16. 4 Alabama and is now No. 9. “They still have an opportunity, but I will tell you that the committee has a hard time evaluating those teams who have not had significant victories, haven’t won games over better than”.
Iowa jumping over Baylor is a bit odd, because the only things that happened last week were: Baylor winning by seven on the road at Kansas State, Iowa winning by eight at IN and Iowa’s second-best opponent, Wisconsin, winning a meaningless game against Maryland. Could Notre Dame suffer the same fate? Notre Dame also finishes the season with No. 7 Stanford.
Two previously unbeaten teams tumbled.
When it’s all over, which team will really have the better schedule?
Iowa moved up four spots to fifth, and No. 6 Baylor is the highest-ranked Big 12 team. Clemson beat Notre Dame 24-22 on October three, & Ohio State beat Alabama in last season’s Playoff semifinals. Each team’s placement isn’t done in a vacuum and is based on more than just its most recent game, but Oklahoma State had to be hoping for a bigger surge. The committee feels that Oklahoma State’s home loss to Baylor and Baylor’s loss to a two-loss TCU team are worse than LSU’s one loss at Bama. But we have seen that the committee values who you beat more than who you lose to.
Oklahoma State moved up six spots to No. 8, which isn’t insignificant, but consider that Stanford rose four spots from No. 11 to No. 7 after its win over Colorado and Iowa moved up from No. 9 to No. 5 after beating Indiana. That’s the best loss the Irish could have, close and on the road to No. 1.
No. 3 Ohio State has beaten three winning teams, but two are MAC teams – Northern IL and Western MI.
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The rest of the rankings get a bit murkier, which committee chairman Jeff Long fully admitted on ESPN’s rankings show. But that’s also a unusual way for a committee to judge only what has happened so far, especially given that Baylor has looked more dominant than Ohio State against what has also been a weak schedule.
