What We Learned From the Initial College Football Playoff Rankings for the Future
Let's start this practice off with some honesty here: by no means does any of this insinuate that I think the Arizona Wildcats have a chance at the College Football Playoffs this year.
With the way that things have gone, and the roster unlikely to improve for next season, it may be quite some time before the Wildcats have an opportunity to play in the tournament.
However, with the first College Football Playoff rankings in the expanded era dropping last night, there are some things that Arizona can look at and keep in mind moving forward that could better position the program to keep their expectations in check as they work toward the one goal of every college football team: winning the National Championship.
As it stands for the Big 12, with how the rankings shook out, that may be easier said than done, even for the currently undefeated teams.
Scott Dochterman of The Athletic broke down the key takeaways from the initial rankings, and it seems that even with College Football Playoff and conference expansion, the Big 12 is still looked down upon by the committee.
"The committee rewarded the league with four ranked teams, which is just one behind 2023 and the same as in 2022," writes Dochterman, "But there is reason for agitation with where the teams are ranked. BYU at No. 9 means it is in a dangerous spot to fall out of the Playoff should it lose the Big 12 championship, while the other three are in no position to earn an at-large bid."
The BYU Cougars enter the week as one of the few remaining undefeated teams left in the country, with three such teams ahead of them in the rankings, and five one-loss teams listed higher.
The other three teams that made the initial top 25 finished 17th (Iowa State Cyclones), 19th (Kansas State Wildcats), and 20th (Colorado Buffaloes), giving each of them essentially only one path to the playoffs, a conference championship, and for those three teams, even that may not be enough.
For Arizona, these initial rankings mean that moving forward, in future seasons, they must win all of the games on their schedule, and the Big 12 Championship in order to be taken seriously for the College Football Playoffs.
It has been made very clear how the committee views each of the Power Four conferences and their hierarchy, and as it stands now, the Big 12 sits at the bottom of the list.
