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Mark Schlabach, ESPN Senior Writer
Barring an upset in Saturday’s ACC championship game between Clemson and SMU, Alabama could have returned to the College Football Playoff for the ninth time in the past 11 seasons.
The Crimson Tide were ranked No. 11 in the CFP selection committee’s penultimate rankings Tuesday, one spot ahead of Miami. The Tide lost three times under first-year coach Kalen DeBoer, including a 24-3 loss at Oklahoma on Nov. 23.
The Hurricanes suffered their second loss of the season, 42-38 at Syracuse. Miami will be the first team out of the 12-team playoffs based on the current rankings as the fifth-highest ranked conference champion will jump.
Since either Alabama or Miami qualified for the championship game of their respective conferences, it would seem that the Hurricanes will have a difficult time jumping the tide in the final rankings, which will be released by the selection committee Sunday.
The chairman of the CFP selection committee, Warde Manuel, said on ESPN’s release of the rankings that showed Tuesday night that the teams not competing in the championship game this weekend, including Alabama and Miami, will not change their rankings because they are not playing another game.
“Any team that’s not playing right now, we don’t have any data points to reorder that team’s rankings, and that’s how we see them going into the final week of the championship week,” Manuel said. “Nothing is going to change for us to evaluate it differently than it is now.
“Teams that didn’t play can’t be matched against other teams that didn’t play, but the winning team (game) we’ll evaluate those data points to determine if there should be a move, based on how the game performed.”
College Football Playoff top 25 rankings 🔥 pic.twitter.com/GuL2GvJrka
– ESPN (@espn) December 4, 2024
Manuel noted that Alabama is 3-1 against committee-ranked teams, and Miami is 0-1. The Tide is 6-1 against opponents with a winning record, and the Hurricanes are 4-2.
“Both sides have some unexpected losses from the game, but in the last three games, Miami has lost twice, and for us, when we evaluate the body of work, we feel that Alabama has lost. Miami,” said Manuel.
Undefeated Oregon remains No. 1 in the committee’s ranking, followed by Texas, Penn State, Notre Dame and Georgia.
Ohio State, which was on the wrong end of a stunning 13-10 loss to Michigan at home on Friday, fell four places to No. 6. Tennessee, SMU, Indiana and Boise State rounded out the top 10.
After Alabama and Miami, Ole Miss is 13th and South Carolina is 14th.
Based on the current rankings, the top four conference champions who will receive first-round byes in the 12-team bracket are Oregon, Texas, SMU and Boise State.
If Boise State loses to UNLV in Saturday’s Mountain West Conference championship game, the winner of Saturday’s Big 12 championship game between No. 15 Arizona State and No. 16 Iowa State is probably the fourth-highest-rated conference champion.
The first-round matchups, based on the current rankings, will look like this: No. 12 Arizona State at No. 5 Penn State; No. 11 Alabama at No. 6 Notre Dame; No. 10 Indiana at No. 7 Georgia; and No. 9 Tennessee at No. 8 Ohio State.
“You can change. It all depends on the result of this (conference championship) game,” Manuel said. “Like I said, we respect the guys who played in the conference championship.”
But Alabama might not be completely out of the woods if Clemson beats SMU in the ACC championship game on Saturday. If the Tigers are going to secure the ACC’s automatic bid, the selection committee will have to decide whether to include the 11-2 Mustangs or the 9-3 Crimson Tide.
Miami’s ranking is out of line with the league. In a statement, released after the show ended, ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips said the conference was “incredibly shocked and disappointed” that the Hurricanes fell six places to No. 12 and added that the team coach Mario Cristobal “really deserves better from the committee.”
“When we look ahead to the final rankings,” he said, “I hope the committee will reconsider and put Miami on the field.”
Cristobal argued this week that the Hurricanes (10-2) deserve it because they have lost fewer games than other teams considered one of the at-large bids.
“We won 10 games this year and not many teams have that,” Cristobal said Tuesday in his weekly appearance on WQAM, the Hurricanes’ flagship radio station. “And in our loss, that loss was one. It’s a very different resume than a 9-3 team. The award should go to the team that actually won, not the politicians themselves. loss.”
The Hurricanes, as Manuel alluded to, lost two of their past three games – they also fell 28-23 at Georgia Tech on November 9 – and they did not beat the team currently ranked by the CFP.
Along with the loss at Oklahoma, the Crimson Tide fell 40-35 at Vanderbilt and 24-17 at Tennessee. Alabama beat three CFP-ranked teams this week: Georgia, South Carolina and Missouri.
“We’re one of the top 12 teams, as far as we can see,” DeBoer said on “The Pat McAfee Show” Tuesday.
The committee ranked the Tide higher than two other SEC teams with three losses: Ole Miss and South Carolina. (The Gamecocks have won six games in a row.)
Iowa State was No. 16 in the CFP rankings, followed by Clemson, BYU, Missouri and UNLV. Illinois, Syracuse, Colorado, Army and Memphis round out the top 25.
Army is back in the rankings, while Syracuse and Memphis are ranked first this season. Tulane, Texas A&M and Kansas State fell from the top 25 after losses last week.
Four first-round matches will be played at the home campus of each seeded team on December 20 and 21.
The four quarterfinal games will be staged at the VRBO Fiesta Bowl, the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, the Rose Bowl presented by Prudential and the Allstate Sugar Bowl on December 31 and January 1.
The two semifinal games will take place at the Capital One Orange Bowl and the Goodyear Cotton Bowl on January 9 and 10.
The CFP National Championship presented by AT&T is scheduled for January 20 at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.
