A lot of questions will be at least partially answered Tuesday night.
The College Football Playoff committee will unveil its initial rankings in a special show on ESPN at 7 p.m.
We’ll learn how the committee views the playoff contenders, specifically teams like BYU and Texas Tech, or how it views the one-loss SEC teams in comparison teams from other conferences with one or no losses.
We’ll also learn how much wiggle room Ole Miss may have and if a playoff game might be played in Oxford.
The Rebels, ranked No. 7 in the AP and Coaches Poll, are almost certainly going to be included in the committee’s top 12. The top four seeds in the playoff get first round byes and the teams seeded No. 5-8 get to host playoff games at their home fields.
That could lead to a possibility where a team like Notre Dame comes to Oxford to face the Rebels in a playoff game.
But there’s still a month left in the season and a lot can and will happen to shake up the playoff rankings we see tonight.
“I really hadn’t thought much about that,” Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin said on Monday. “Because it’s still so early and so much left to play. I’d look less about where we are at and more of that just to see, okay, are they actually going to pay as much attention that we were told they are going to now?”
Kiffin was referring to the criteria the CFP committee uses to determine its rankings, something that Kiffin and other coaches weren’t shy about criticizing.
The committee has made changes to its criteria and that was big reason why the SEC decided to add a ninth conference game to its schedule. However, Kiffin would be in favor of even more changes to the playoff.
“I just hope they get over the way that we’ve thought in football for so long, how they’ve thought,” Kiffin said. “Other sports don’t think this way. Baseball doesn’t say this many from this conference. Then all of a sudden you go into the postseason in the college world series and half the teams are in the SEC.
“That’s how our sports should be too. And I’m not saying that just because the SEC, there might be years that that’s the Big Ten, maybe. I don’t think there should be any automatics at all. If you figure out who the best team is, if you can’t figure it out, ask Vegas. They know.”
Ole Miss and the rest of the college football world will learn a lot about how the rest of this season will play out when the initial CFP rankings are released at 7 p.m. on ESPN.
