The College Football Playoff selection committee revealed its first set of rankings Tuesday night, placing Mississippi State, Florida State, Auburn and Mississippi as its top four teams, in that order.
The 12-person committee met Monday and Tuesday in a conference room at the Gaylord Texan hotel near Dallas to debate the merits of each team and then determine its top 25. The top four teams when the final rankings are released on Dec. 7 will gain entry into the inaugural playoff.
While Mississippi State and Florida State are undefeated, Auburn and Mississippi each have one loss. Rounding out the committee’s top 10 were other one-loss teams in No. 5 Oregon, No. 6 Alabama, No. 7 Texas Christian, No. 8 Michigan State, No. 9 Kansas State and No. 10 Notre Dame.
The committee’s top four did not mirror those selected by The Associated Press this week: in that ranking, Alabama was third and Auburn was fourth.
The highest-profile team to lose the most spots between the A.P. poll and the committee’s was Notre Dame, which slipped from No. 6 to No. 10.
The biggest beneficiaries of the committee were Mississippi (A.P.’s No. 7), which is coming off a 10-7 loss at Louisiana State, and Texas Christian (No. 10). Placing Mississippi above Alabama most likely reflects an emphasis on head-to-head results — the Rebels beat the Crimson Tide, 23-17, on Oct. 4.
In an interview on ESPN minutes after the rankings were released, Jeff Long, the committee’s chairman and Arkansas’s athletic director, stressed that the members looked at teams’ complete body of work.
“It’s important for me to point out we really don’t look at it as a conference,” Long said. “We look at those teams, we analyze the teams they played, and we looked at the successes they had, the failures they had.”
The final rankings, released the Sunday after several conferences hold their championship games, will determine the composition of the six playoff-affiliated bowls, including the two semifinal bowls.
There are many more weeks of action left to jumble the playoff picture. Four of the top six teams are in the Southeastern Conference’s West Division, and there are several matchups between them, including Auburn’s game at Mississippi on Saturday night.
Tuesday’s rankings were nonetheless intensely anticipated because they offer the first glimpse at what the committee will place value on before it decides the final four.
“It’s early, it’s close and it’s going to change,” Long said in a statement.
Mississippi State, which has quality wins against Auburn and at L.S.U., is a relatively uncontroversial No. 1 pick. It still has games at Alabama and at Mississippi. Florida State’s two best victories of the season, against Clemson and Notre Dame, both at home, were decided late. The Seminoles beat the Tigers in overtime and secured the other win after an apparent go-ahead touchdown by the Irish in the final minute was called back because of a penalty. Its toughest remaining contest is likely to be Thursday night at Louisville.
Before Tuesday, members of the committee talked about the importance of strength of schedule. The Bowl Championship Series, in place for the previous 16 seasons, “was strictly driven by computer rankings, all of which included strength-of-schedule to some extent,” Bill Hancock, the playoff’s executive director who does not have a vote, said at the start of the season. “But we believe that the committee probably would give more weight to the strength-of-schedule than the computer rankings did.”
The respect shown to Auburn, which crushed L.S.U. and beat Kansas State on the road, displayed the importance of strength of schedule. So did the members’ snubbing of Marshall, which at 8-0 has the best record in the Football Bowl Subdivision but has not played a single team in the so-called Big 5 conferences.
On the other hand, Arizona, at No. 12, did not seem to get full credit for defeating Oregon on the road. The same might be said for No. 13 Baylor, which narrowly beat T.C.U. at home.
In the playoff semifinals, the top seed will play the fourth seed, and the second will play the third. The top seed will be placed where it has a stronger home-field advantage. This season, the two semifinal games will be the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl, on Jan. 1. The championship game will be held Jan. 12 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Tex.
This season, the teams competing in the Orange, the Fiesta, the Cotton and the Peach Bowls will also be determined in part by the committee’s rankings.
The top-ranked conference champion from the so-called Group of Five — the F.B.S. conferences outside the Big 5 — is guaranteed a berth in one of those bowls. East Carolina, at No. 23, is on pace to receive that spot, assuming it wins its conference.
The playoff committee will meet weekly and release six more sets of rankings. The members — which include five athletic directors, like Long and Wisconsin’s Barry Alvarez; former coaches like Tom Osborne; and Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state — have been encouraged to let Long and Hancock represent the group to the news media. A 13th member, Archie Manning, is on leave this season because of health issues.
Long will hold weekly interviews to explain the rankings on ESPN, which has a 12-year, $7.3 billion contract with the 10 F.B.S. conferences (plus a few independents) for the playoff. The committee’s ballots are secret.
The committee has access to game tape as well as advanced statistics.
“Without a doubt, these rankings are going to be scrutinized like no other,” Steve Wieberg, a former college football reporter who is on the committee, said last week, adding that there was “no collaborative process like this one.”