The final playoff pairings will be announced Sunday at 12:30 p.m. with the bowl game selections to come at 3 p.m. Sunday.
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The top five of the College Football Playoff rankings remained the same Tuesday with undefeated Clemson holding onto the top spot followed by Alabama, Oklahoma and Iowa.
Ohio State would figure to be a better bet than even a 12-1 ACC champion North Carolina club to make the playoffs. The Sooners do have perhaps the three most impressive wins in TCU and on the road against Baylor and Oklahoma State, but if the committee stays consistent with their values, they will put Alabama, with its stronger overall schedule and better loss back ahead of the Sooners once they claim an SEC title. The Irish dropped from fourth to eighth; Florida State and North Carolina moved up to Nos. Losses by Baylor, Michigan, Oklahoma State, and Florida aided the Tar Heels’ launch into the top ten. Clemson has been the unwavering No. 1 team from the start of the process, but it looked really, really shaky in the win over a miserable SC team.
Ohio State’s case: The Buckeyes just throttled MI, finally looking like the No. 1 team we’ve known lurked inside them all season. “It’s a cliche now, but it was razor-thin, paper-thin between Nos.3, 4, 5 and 6”. That’s a worse loss than Ohio State’s in the second game of 2014 to Virginia Tech, which finished 6-6. “Games at the end of the season might be more fresh in our mind, but it’s important to the committee that we make sure that we value wins at whatever point in the season they occur against quality opponents”.
Ohio State defeated six bowl teams, with no victory better than the finale against the Wolverines. Could a 13-0 Iowa team, fresh off a Big Ten championship, jump the one-loss Sooners? The No. 1 team will be placed where it has greater home-field advantage.
The simplest path for Ohio State is probably the most unlikely. If it’s not Clemson winning the ACC, it’s No. 8 North Carolina. The Seminoles rode their 27-2 victory to a No. 9 ranking this week. If the Cougars defeat No. 22 Temple (10-2) in this weekend’s AAC Championship Game, they should receive an invitation to a New Year’s Six access bowl.
“In the committee’s eyes, if a team has not clearly separated itself above another and they are clearly equal, then we apply those four criteria of conference champion, head-to-head and those factors”, CFP committee chairman Jeff Long said. Some analysts argued that either Alabama or Oklahoma, which each won convincingly Saturday, could ascend to the No. 1 spot this week. But in reality the victor of the Big Ten Championship Game is going to the playoff.
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Ohio State, the defending national champions, must hope also that No. 7 Stanford (10-2) does not vault past it, given that the Cardinal has a chance to pad its résumé with a Pacific-12 championship game against No. 20 Southern California (8-4), which Stanford beat already this season on September 19 in Los Angeles.
