The first College Football Playoff rankings of the 2025 season are arriving on Tuesday night, and fiery debates will inevitably accompany them.
With four weeks left in the college football season, and about 30 teams at least ostensibly still alive for the 12-team CFP field, this season could be as contentious as ever. Throw in a new metric that the CFP committee is using to help determine the rankings, and who knows what the top 12 will look like on Tuesday night?
I don’t have the answer for what the top 12 will look like, but I do have a few hunches about which teams will come away feeling slighted.
Every two-loss SEC team, even Missouri, still has a fighting chance for the College Football Playoff. However, as the AP Poll for Week 11 stands, the Sooners would just miss the 12-team CFP field, sitting at No. 11 and ahead of the highest-ranked ACC and Group of Six team. Those automatic qualifiers would jump the Sooners, leaving them as the first team out, but that’s only if the committee doesn’t give Oklahoma’s biggest rival the nod.
Texas’s loss to Florida is worse than Oklahoma’s losses to Ole Miss and Texas, but by virtue of a head-to-head win, with the same record, it won’t be surprising if the Longhorns jump the Sooners on Tuesday night and find a way into the field. Texas currently sits at No. 13 in the AP Poll after a win over Vanderbilt, and could keep climbing higher.
Because of the head-to-head result, Oklahoma fans can’t be terribly mad if Texas leapfrogs their team, but there is an argument that Notre Dame, currently No. 10 in the AP Poll, shouldn’t be ahead of the Sooners either. If the Irish get in the field in the first rankings release, Sooners fans should probably direct their ire towards South Bend.
Louisville is not the highest-ranked ACC team in the Week 11 poll, but it should be. The 7-1 Cardinals are No. 14, two spots behind 7-1 Virginia, because of a head-to-head result from Week 6, but this is a case where that should probably be overlooked. UVA has the best chance to be the ACC’s representative in this first rankings release, but Louisville has proven to be the best team in the conference.
It’s easy to argue for the Cavaliers to be in. If a head-to-head win doesn’t matter, then why do we play the games? The reason that Louisville fans could be so frustrated on Tuesday night is the memory of that loss to Virginia. Louisville dominated that game, finished with a 53 percent success rate to Virginia’s 38 percent, and held UVA to 3.44 yards per play, but turned the ball over twice, and that proved costly.
Can Louisville be mad at the committee if it gets ranked behind Louisville? No. But it should be mad at itself for losing that game and leaving it up for debate.
Now we get to see how much the committee’s new “record strength” metric actually comes into play. The metric is likely to weigh more heavily toward SEC teams, factoring in the depth of that conference, and if there’s any team that would be punished unexpectedly, it’d likely be BYU. The Cougars are unbeaten at 8-0, with a win over Utah, which ranks 7th in FPI after beating Cincinnati convincingly in Week 10. However, BYU’s next best win is over Iowa, FPI No. 38, and played Portland State, Stanford, and East Carolina in the non-conference.
Beating Texas Tech next week and this all takes care of itself anyway, but there’s a chance that BYU fans feel disrespected on Tuesday night.