College Football Playoff Rankings Running Thread

Bowl assignments are out. That thumping you hear is the collective punching of walls in newsrooms across Mississippi and Georgia, thanks to the 8 p.m. New Year's Eve Orange Bowl matchup of Mississippi State and Georgia Tech.

http://espn.go.com/college-football/schedule/_/seasontype/3/week/1

 

The Boca Raton Bowl is a new one on me. Game starts at 6pm but those fans arriving at 4 will get a discount on the buffet.

The U vs South Carolina is a nice draw for the initial Duck Commander Bowl

 

The Duck Commander Bowl is the Independence Bowl. It has a long, proud history of matching up mediocre and underachieving power conference teams.

 

With all the bowls out there, there were still six bowl-eligible FBS teams that were left out. UAB was one of them.

 

For what it's worth, if there were an eight-team playoff, the matchups would be Bama-Michigan State, Miss. State-Oregon, FSU-TCU and Ohio State-Baylor. That's assuming all other things being equal, including that the committee didn't manipulate the 5-8 rankings given their new-found importance.

But I gotta say, that's not the most inspiring set of matchups I've ever seen.

ETA: Yeah, I typed that and then obviously didn't. Or something.

 

Please give me teams 7 and 8 that you feel are deserved to currently claim they're the best in the country.

 

Also Mississippi State-Oregon.

And if they were going to manipulate the rankings, they would have put Ohio State 3rd yesterday so that everyone would have gotten the Alabama-FSU matchup they wanted in the semifinals.

 

An eight team playoff is going to have two or more two loss teams almost every year, and in some of those years, not many but some, one of those teams will win a game or two. I could see Mississippi State, in a game it played well, beating Oregon, for instance. It'd be an upset, but not an earth-shatterer.
And one very minor further argument for expanding the field was given to me by the paper's listing of all the bowl games. Maybe it's just a fluke, but the matchups in the so-called minor bowls (non-former BCS bowls) are dreadful this year. About the only one that struck me as worth making time to watch, as opposed to watching it because it's on in the bar, is Arizona State-Duke in the Sun Bowl. Maybe K-State-UCLA in the Alamo Bowl, too.

 

The Big 12 is in a fix when it comes to expanding. BYU and Boise State are the only options that won't result in making the league weaker. Anyone else defeats the purpose.

SMU and Rice? Might as well invite Incarnate Word and Houston Baptist. And forget poaching Arkansas and LSU from the SEC. Just get the waiver and play the championship game.

 

Houston and Tulsa would be better than SMU and Rice.

 

FB, assuming the Big 12 had a conference title game, how would they split the divisions? There are four Texas schools and six non-Texas schools.There wouldn't be any guarantee TCU and Baylor, using this year as a random example of the conference's two best teams, weren't in the same division. If Baylor's win over K-State Saturday night had been a conference title game, would it have changed committee minds? I think Ohio State's margin of victory was the difference and there was nothing the Big 12 could do about that.

 

I like the K State - UCLA game but not overwhelmed by Az St / Duke. State is going to be disappointed that they did not get to bigger bowl game and Duke is boring as shit to watch.

Like the BC / Penn St matchup in Pinstripe Bowl. Last couple of years that's been a pretty good game. I think teams are motivated because it's Yankee Stadium.

Also like Gamecocks and The U in Duck Commander Bowl. Mixing The Robertson Clan / Spurrier
and The U fan base seems like an entertaining mix.