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Halloween has become synonymous with the College Football Playoff rankings for fans as the initial set of rankings are released during the holiday week. The first set of rankings will be revealed on Tuesday, October 30th at 7 p.m. Eastern. While we have not seen this year's rankings, historically the committee has tended to emphasize a few factors.
The first is quality of wins, what top teams have defeated the most impressive group of teams. Secondly, a team's strength of schedule matters, but it is worth noting that only a few of the projected top teams have great strength of schedules. This is a bit of a fluid metric as many of the top team's have difficult Novembers which will help their strength of schedule numbers improve by the time the committee makes their final rankings.
This is also a new committee group which means that past precedent matters, but each group tends to prioritize certain criteria each year. Here's how the College Football Playoff explains their metrics for evaluating teams.
"The four teams that go to the College Football Playoff are determined by the College Football Playoff Selection Committee," the College Football Playoff site notes. "The selection committee chooses the four teams for the playoff based on strength of schedule, head-to-head results against common opponents, championships won and other factors."
How this plays out tends to vary a bit from year to year based on how the committee looks at these factors. It will be worth watching how this particular group evaluates this year's teams. After Alabama, the group of teams is a lot closer together when evaluating their resumes.
Fans Will Be Watching to See How the Committee Evaluates One-Loss Teams
There are several one-loss teams that are expected to start out high in the rankings. It will be interesting to see how a team like LSU with a strong strength of schedule is compared to Notre Dame who is undefeated. UCF owns the nation's longest winning streak, but there is some skepticism over how high the Knights will be ranked given the strength of schedule metric.
UCF's schedule does get a bit better in November with upcoming games against Cincinnati, Navy and USF. After UCF's resume was called into question on ESPN's College Gameday, UCF athletic director Danny White responded on Twitter to the criticism.
"College football has become a subjective popularity contest," White noted in the statement. "The Knights represent all of the teams who- for reasons of history, geography or politics- are left out of the club."
Click the next arrow to see my predictions for the order of the first edition of the 2018 College Football Playoff rankings. The AP Poll rankings heading into Week 9 are listed next to each team.