When the College Football Playoff selection committee begins to meet in November, it will have had 10 full weeks of games to evaluate, helping to determine its first top 25 ranking.
After participating in a recent mock selection exercise in Grapevine, Texas, designed to help the media understand the process in selecting the new 12-team field, there are three main inflection points worth underlining in the committee's process:
Who gets the first-round byes (awarded to the four highest-ranked conference champions)?
Who will host the first-round games (awarded to the higer ranked schools)?
Who gets the final spots? Teams the committee has ranked No. 11 and No. 12 could very well get bumped out of the bracket in favor of the fifth highest-ranked conference champion -- and in some scenarios the fourth highest-ranked conference champion.
The committee's weekly ranking is still the most critical step in determining the seeding for the 12-team bracket. The group does not look ahead, so what you'll find below doesn't either. It's not a prediction. It's a snapshot of what the committee might do today -- through three weeks of data. This is not a ranking. This is what the seeding and bracket would look like based on the committee's projected top 12 for this week.
This can and will change every week -- and this week there's a change at the top.
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Group of 5