It\u2019s been a confusing college football season so far. Nobody felt that more deeply than the College Football Playoff selection committee, which raised eyebrows galore in its first attempt of the season to make sense of it all.<\/p>\n
Undefeated Miami received top billing in the committee’s first crack at the CFP rankings Tuesday, followed by Georgia and undefeated Utah.<\/p>\n
From there, the 13 people in that room could have been picking from a hat. Defending champion Indiana was ranked fourth \u2014 eight spots ahead of Ohio State, which beat the Hoosiers last month but has since lost quarterback Julian Sayin.<\/p>\n
At No. 5 was Alabama \u2014 eight spots ahead of Tennessee, only a few weeks removed from a 16-point loss to the Vols. At No. 6 was Kentucky, followed by Texas.<\/p>\n
UCLA, the nation’s only other undefeated team, was ranked eighth.<\/p>\n
Oh, and Notre Dame. The Irish were ranked 11th \u2014 seven spots lower than their spot in the AP Top 25 \u2014 and received a simple message: As the last team that would make the bracket if the playoffs started today, they need to beat Miami on Saturday or risk slipping due to a schedule that clearly did not impress the committee.<\/p>\n
Ohio State was ranked 12th, but would be on the outside looking in because Boise State, ranked 25th, would get the Group of Six automatic bid.<\/p>\n
Sign up for Top 25 poll alerts here<\/a>, visit the Top 25 here<\/a> and see AP\u2019s full college football coverage here<\/a><\/p>\n \n Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup.\n <\/p>\n \n Error! There was an error processing your request.\n <\/p>\n Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s been a confusing college football season so far. Nobody felt that more deeply than the College Football…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":446645,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[21702,111,143,57,477,123,125,124,110,1110],"class_list":["post-446644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-college-football-playoff-rankings","tag-college-sports","tag-college-football","tag-football","tag-general-news","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news","tag-sports","tag-u-s-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/446645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}