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, Ohio State.
The Buckeyes took the top spot in the first set of 2025 rankings Tuesday, 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 at the beginning of the season 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. 6 when the final list will set the bracket for college football’s 12-team playoff.
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 based on these rankings, 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 5 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.
“If we go back to last year, Arizona State wasn’t even in the rankings for our first two rankings,” Rhoades said of the Sun Devils, who won the Big 12 and made the field. “Again, to everybody out there, this is the first ranking and still a lot of ball left to be played.”
The final tally in the top 12: SEC 6 teams, Big Ten 3, Big 12 2, ACC 0, with one independent.
Among those still holding out hope are teams such as 16th-ranked Vanderbilt and 17th-ranked Georgia Tech, each of whom spent time in the AP Top 10 this season thanks to upsets that turned college football upside down through September and October.
Tweaks in this year’s bracket
The biggest change in the setup of this year’s bracket was eliminating the first-round bye for the four best conference champions. It would mean that Virginia, instead of jumping from a No. 14 ranking to a No. 3 seed, would be seeded 11th with a road game against Mississippi.
Rhoades also spent time discussing Oregon, which was ranked sixth in the AP poll but ninth in the playoff rankings. The Ducks’ best win this year was a 20-point victory over Northwestern, while its double-overtime win at Penn State early in the season has become less impressive as last year’s semifinalists have imploded.
“When we looked at and evaluated Oregon, we really looked at the quality of the team and how they looked on film,” Rhoades said.
A look at the first-round matchups based on this set of rankings
No. 12 Memphis at No. 5 Georgia: You can almost hear SEC commissioner Greg Sankey breaking his TV wondering how an unranked team is in here over one of his.
No. 11 Virginia at No. 6 Ole Miss: Virginia’s only Top 25 meeting this season was against Florida State, which does not resemble a Top 25 team now.
No. 10 Notre Dame at No. 7 BYU: Two schools that mix football and religion did not meet for the first time until 1992.
No. 9 Oregon at No. 8 Texas Tech: Booster Bowl pitting teams backed by billionaires Phil Knight (Ducks) and Cody Campbell (Red Raiders).
