College Football Playoff: 3 takeaways from final rankings of 2018
By Zach Bigalke
1. Oklahoma reached the College Football Playoff by avenging only loss
The drama on early Sunday afternoon all came down to which team would land the No. 4 spot and the last place in the semifinal. On the table were a pair of one-loss Power Five conference champions in Big 12 winner Oklahoma and Big Ten champ Ohio State. Also up for consideration, despite losing on Saturday in a fall-from-ahead defeat to top-ranked Alabama, were the Georgia Bulldogs.
Interestingly, the committee settled on Georgia being a better overall team than Ohio State. It is not an unjustified way of sorting the two squads. The Bulldogs’ two losses came against ranked LSU and Alabama squads, while the Buckeyes suffered their only defeat against 6-6 Purdue. Between the two losses, LSU lost by a combined 27 points; Ohio State’s lone defeat came by a whopping 29 points against a .500 Purdue squad.
That left Oklahoma to swoop in and snatch away the final spot in the College Football Playoff field. By defeating Texas in the Big 12 championship game at AT&T Stadium in Arlington on Saturday afternoon, the Sooners avenged their only loss of the season. Both times the two rivals played on neutral turf, and the combined score from the two battles came out with Oklahoma ahead by eight points. That was enough to justify their inclusion in the semifinal quartet.