The closest thing resembling drama for the first big reveal of this season’s College Football Playoff rankings hinged on which undefeated team would receive top billing.
Answer: The defending champions at Ohio State.
The Buckeyes took the top spot in the first set of 2025 rankings Tuesday night, followed by Indiana and Texas A&M.
In choosing the two Big Ten teams ahead of Texas A&M, the 12-person committee appeared to give less weight to A&M’s tougher schedule and its 41-40 win over tenth-ranked Notre Dame and more to the way the Buckeyes and Hoosiers have mowed down opponents this year, with only two games between the two of them decided by less than 10 points.
“I think statistically when we looked at A&M defensively, they’re just lower than both Ohio State and Indiana,” committee chair Mack Rhoades said. “We had to make a hard decision, and you’re trying to find separators, and that was a separator for us.”
Another team with no losses, BYU of the Big 12, was ranked seventh.
Nos. 4, 5 and 6 went to Southeastern Conference teams with one loss each — Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi. All of the top six came from either the Big Ten or SEC, a dose of business as usual despite a season that has been anything but predictable.
This marked the first of six weekly rankings the committee will release this season, ending Dec. 7 when the final list will set the bracket for the second 12-team playoff in major college football history.
That tournament begins Dec. 19-20 with four games on the campus of seeds No. 5-8. The top four seeds play winners of those games over the New Year holiday and the title game is set for Jan. 19 at Hard Rock Stadium outside Miami.
Texas Tech was ranked eighth and Oregon came in at No. 9. Rounding out the top 12 were Notre Dame — the only team in the Top 25 not from a power conference — then Texas and Oklahoma.
But if the bracket were set today, the Longhorns and Sooners would miss out,- bumped by No. 14 Virginia of the ACC and Memphis of the American. That’s thanks to a rule that places the five best-ranked conference champions into the bracket even if they’re not in the top 12.
Memphis wasn’t among the committee’s top 25 but was still the highest ranked leader in a Group of Five conference.
There is, of course, plenty of time for teams to make their cases, with four more weeks of the regular season, then a slate of conference title games set for the first weekend in December.
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