College Football Playoff: Do the first Top 25 rankings matter?

The first Top 25 rankings are due to be released by the College Football Playoff selection committee on Tuesday. Will this set of rankings even matter?

When the College Football Playoff selection committee deliberates ahead of releasing their first Top 25 rankings on October 30, they will combine an overwhelming amount of data in an opaque process to determine a pecking order that is guaranteed to shift over the course of the regular season.

But fans love rankings, and there is a reason why weekly polls have endured since the AP first released its poll in 1936. Serving as a finger on the pulse of a season, polls and other rankings offer us a snapshot in the moment of which teams are the best in a given season.

As we saw in last week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback, what the AP Top 25 says in the preseason often fails to capture what is really happening in a given season. But that same trend largely holds true for the Top 25 rankings put out weekly starting this week by the College Football Playoff committee.

Let’s dive in for this week’s edition to see whether the inaugural College Football Playoff rankings have any opportunity to tell us who will actually be in the semifinals this year.

2014: Mississippi State, Florida State, Auburn, Ole Miss

When the College Football Playoff officially first came online with the selection committee’s release of their first Top 25 rankings on October 28, 2014, three SEC West teams appeared in the top four spots of the list. None would be in the final four when the first College Football Playoff semifinals commenced at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena and at the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans on New Year’s Day 2015.

Mississippi State was the first-ever No. 1 in the selection committee’s eyes. The Bulldogs, in their sixth season under head coach Dan Mullen, were already the top-ranked team in the AP Top 25 when they took down Kentucky 45-31 in Lexington the weekend prior to the rankings release. The Bulldogs stayed atop the poll through wins against Arkansas and FCS Tennessee-Martin, but they fell short in a 25-20 loss to Alabama in Tuscaloosa and ultimately finished seventh in the committee rankings.

Auburn opened at No. 3 in the new rankings, their only loss through the first two months of the 2014 regular season coming on the road against top-ranked Mississippi State. With the confidence of the selection committee backing them, the Tigers lost back-to-back games against Texas A&M and Georgia early in November 2014. Auburn eventually fell from No. 3 to No. 19 over the final month of the season.

Ole Miss was the third SEC West team included in the top four of the first College FootbalL Plaoff selection committee rankings. The Rebels slotted in at No. 4 in the country, despite just losing to LSU the weekend before the rankings were released for the first time. After taking several more losses, the Rebels finished 9-3 and ranked ninth in the committee’s hierarchy.

The only team to survive being named in the first set of top-four teams was Florida State. The Seminoles were the defending national champions, having toppled Auburn in the final BCS title game the previous year. But, despite staying undefeated after opening at No. 2, Florida State fell down a spot to No. 3 as both Alabama (No. 6 in first College Football poll released) and Oregon (No. 5 in first playoff poll).

2015: Clemson, LSU, Ohio State, Alabama

The second edition of the College Football Playoff saw the selection committee release their Top 25 for the first time in 2015 on November 3. This time, only two of the four teams listed in the initial release were still standing by the end of the regular season.

Clemson and Alabama both reached the four-team playoff. LSU and Ohio State were not quite as lucky. Ohio State, the defending national champions, went on to lose a few week’s later at Michigan State as they missed their chance to mount an effective title defense. Instead, the single loss kept the Buckeyes out of the playoff and relegated them to the Fiesta Bowl.

LSU, on the other hand, immediately lost three in a row after being elevated to No. 2 in the country. The Tigers turned around after the College Football Playoff committee named them to the top four in their first poll of the 2015 season and crumbled against Alabama, Arkansas, and Ole Miss in quick succession.

After the first two years of the College Football Playoff, the committee had only a 37.5 percent strike rate on picking semifinalists in their opening set of rankings.

2016: Alabama, Clemson, Michigan, Texas A&M

In 2016, at least two SEC West teams made it into the top four of the first set of College Football Playoff rankings for the third year in a row. Only one would actually manage to make the field, as the selection committee batted .500 on their picks for the second straight year.

Texas A&M was tabbed as the No. 4 team in the country when the rankings first came out on November 1, 2016. The Aggies were coming off a rout of New Mexico State, with their lone loss of the season to that point taking place in Tuscaloosa against the top-ranked Crimson Tide. After being named to the top four, however, the Aggies dropped all of their last three conference games to Mississippi State, Ole Miss, and LSU. Two weeks before the end of the year, A&M was completely out of the rankings.

Michigan, meanwhile, was elevated to No. 3 in the FBS by the selection committee after the Wolverines opened the year 8-0. Jim Harbaugh‘s crew backed up their pick a week later by improving to 9-0 in a 59-3 takedown of Maryland. But the Wolverines lost two of their last three, falling at Iowa and at Ohio State to drop to No. 6 in the country.

Alabama and Clemson went on to play one another for the national title for the second year in a row. Instead of Michigan and Texas A&M, however, they were joined by Washington and Ohio State. The Huskies and Buckeyes were respectively No. 5 and No. 6 in the first College Football Playoff Top 25 of the season, meaning they had a short climb to move up into a semifinal position.

2017: Georgia, Alabama, Notre Dame, Clemson

Last year, the selection committee actually got their selections mostly right in their opening rankings of the season. Three of the four teams that were named in semifinal spots on October 31, 2017 actually held on to those spots through the end of the regular season.

The only team that was unable to live up to the billing was Notre Dame. Brian Kelly’s squad ended the month of October with only one loss, a heartbreaking 20-19 defeat at home to SEC front-runner Georgia. After the Bulldogs were ranked No. 1 by the committee, it made sense that the Fighting Irish were tabbed as the top-ranked team with a loss on their record. But Notre Dame went on to lose to Miami and Stanford over the final three weeks of the regular season, and the Irish dropped to No. 14 and out of a New Year’s Six berth.

The other three teams, on the other hand, combined to go 35-3 in the regular season. Notre Dame’s replacement proved to be Heisman winner Baker Mayfield and an Oklahoma team that was No. 5 in the initial College Football Playoff rankings of the season.

Final takeaways

Over the first four years of the College Football Playoff, only half of the teams that were selected among the top four in the first release of the selection committee’s rankings at the end of October actually remained in a top-four spot at the end of the regular season.

On five of the eight remaining occasions, the teams that got into the College Football Playoff were either No. 5 or No. 6 in the initial release. There was the case of No. 7 Michigan State staying perfect and clawing their way into the field in 2016.

The other two instances featured teams that were ranked outside the top dozen teams but clawed their way up in the last month of the season.

Ultimately, the College Football Playoff is almost always going to open its weekly rankings by putting a couple of SEC teams among their top four. This year it will probably be Alabama and either LSU or Georgia that earn the nod. Clemson has also been a virtual mainstay and has lived up to that billing the past three years in a row. Notre Dame will almost certainly get the last spot up for grabs.

At least one of these teams, however, will not be playing in the College Football Playoff this season. The selection committee is improving on its hit rate from their initial release to their final release. But they are not perfect by any means, and we are likely going to see at least one surprise emerge over the course of November.