After another eventful weekend of college football comes another College Football Playoff rankings release. These become more important with each passing week as the regular season hits the home stretch. Selection Sunday is less than a month away, after all, and time is running out for teams to leave an impression.
There wasn’t much change at the top this week. In fact, the first five schools are entirely the same. The Big Ten still has four of the top five and it looks to be in good shape for multiple bids. As does the SEC, which would have four teams in the final field if the playoff began today.
The committee didn’t nail everything this week, though. There are a couple of teams that came in a few spots too high, while others continue to be undervalued.
Overrated: No. 8 Miami
Miami is sitting pretty at 9-1, a record befitting a top-10 team at this point in the season. The Hurricanes play an exciting brand of football, quarterbacked by Heisman Trophy contender Cam Ward. They’re certainly a “big brand,” which gives them an inherent bump in the rankings. But Miami isn’t even the top team in its own conference standings. The Hurricanes are behind both SMU, which remains undefeated in ACC play, and Clemson. Can you guess where the Mustangs and Tigers landed in this weeks rankings release? (Hint: not ahead of Miami). It’s also hard to find a real quality win on the Hurricanes’ schedule. They were lucky to escape against the likes of Virginia Tech and California and it just lost to Georgia Tech. Are we really giving them this big of a boost for beating… Louisville? Florida? The quality wins just aren’t there to justify Miami staying in the top 10 after a bad loss.
Underrated: No. 14 BYU
Speaking of bad losses, BYU absolutely deserved to drop after it fell at home against now 4-6 Kansas. The Jayhawks have been hot lately — and they were competitive in a lot of their losses — but this is a team that took almost two months to pick up their first FBS win. An eight-spot drop was pretty harsh, though, especially since BYU still has the No. 8 strength of record (SOR), per ESPN’s FPI metric. That means the Cougars and Tennessee were the only two teams with a top-10 strength of record that didn’t rank in the top 10 of the latest CFP rankings. To add insult to injury, BYU is one spot behind SMU. The same SMU that lost to… BYU earlier in the season. Apparently head-to-head results just don’t matter to the selection committee.
Overrated: No. 23 Missouri
Stop trying to make Missouri happen. It’s not going to happen. What have the Tigers done to continue to earn the benefit of the doubt? Following Saturday’s 34-30 loss to South Carolina, they’re 0-3 against ranked teams this year. That was their only close loss: No. 15 Texas A&M and No. 7 Alabama beat the Tigers by a combined score of 75-10. Diving deeper, Missouri also needed last-second magic to beat the likes of Oklahoma, Auburn, Vanderbilt and Boston College, so it hasn’t even really passed the eye test in the games that it should have handled easily. And don’t use the injury excuse. Missouri was healthy enough (it had Brady Cook, Nate Noel and Luther Burden III) against Texas A&M and South Carolina.
Underrated: No. 19 Army
Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way: no, Army’s resume isn’t all that impressive. The Black Knights have only beat one team with a winning record, and they allowed a season-high 28 points in that game. That said, they are undefeated, and if they played with an SEC patch on their chest, that would be good enough for at least a top-15 spot regardless of record. Army’s SOR currently sits at 19, which matches its ranking in Tuesday’s release. That’s two spots ahead of Colorado’s No. 21 SOR, even though the Buffaloes are 16 in the College Football Playoff rankings. There’s also three-loss South Carolina and two-loss Clemson directly ahead of Army. The Black Knights will have a chance to earn the respect they deserve and dispel any lingering questions about its record this weekend against No. 6 Notre Dame.
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