College Football Playoff Rankings: Just Don’t Look

It’s hard to believe, but November is almost here, and the first College Football Playoff rankings are about to come out.

This is an annual tradition which allows ESPN to squeeze an hour or so of programming out of barely enough content to fill a tweet.

It’s also a near-guarantee to inspire a unique brand of wildly unnecessary angst from fans of virtually every program in America.

Everyone’s team is criminally underrated, except for Alabama, whose coach and fans are upset that their team is going to get overconfident because they’re No. 1.

They throw some rankings against the wall, and then the Playoff Committee chairman comes on and craps out some buzzwords about “game control” or “strength of schedule” to justify it.

Next week, they’ll do it all over again, rearranging teams using the same supposed justifications, but applying them differently.

Criteria from one year may have little or nothing to do with another. Ohio State’s 2015 team did almost exactly what 2017 Alabama did. The Tide got in, the Bucks were left out.

In the end, nothing they say or do before the final week will have much, if any, bearing on the only rankings that matter.

That means that tonight, friends, is the official start of Paul Anka season in college football.

For those unfamiliar with that unofficial holiday, Paul Anka season was inspired by The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror VI.

A group of 50-foot-tall advertising signs comes to life and begins attacking Springfield.

Lounge singer Paul Anka solves the issue by advising the citizens of the city “just don’t look.”

The power of advertising comes from eyeballs. Take that away, and they become powerless.

The same is true of all these mid-season College Football Playoff Ranking shows. Ignore them. Until the day after the conference championship games, they don’t matter. (Just like in the song, that guarantee is void in Tennessee as well. Sorry Vols fans.)

The only things certain at this point are that Alabama will get in, and the Group of 5 conferences will be left out. Everything else is up in the air.

Accept the fact that Ohio State will probably be somewhere between 7 and 14 in this week’s rankings. Exactly where they are in that pecking order is pretty much irrelevant. The Bucks were No. 16 in the initial rankings in 2014 and they made the Playoff.

Wherever they are tonight, a bunch of teams ahead of them will still have to play each other, as well as against other good teams. That means a bunch of them are going to lose.

This weekend alone, Kentucky plays Georgia, Alabama travels to LSU, West Virginia faces Texas, and Michigan plays Penn State. That means that four top-15(ish) teams are guaranteed to lose on Saturday.

More will lose in the weeks to come, and there will be a final shakeup in the conference title games.

If OSU wins out, they stand a good chance of getting in. If they don’t, it doesn’t matter. That’s true whether they are 7th tonight or 15th.

So save your angst for something productive, like the fact that Fun Size candy bars are clearly less fun than full-size ones. Big Candy has been gaslighting you for decades.

Tonight, the Playoff Committee will do the same thing, but only if you let them. Just don’t look.