CFP ranking, Bye week thoughts and an Ole Miss rooting guide
Who should you root for as Ole Miss sits idle this week?
Thanks to the Leap Year, Ole Miss has a second well-timed bye weekend before its final two games of the 2024 season. Let’s take a look at where the Rebels sit in the College Football playoff rankings and who you should root for this weekend.
Ole Miss to No. 11 in the CFP rankings
The Rebels jumped five spots to No. 11 in the College Football Playoff rankings this week after debuting at No. 16 the week prior.
I figured a significant jump was likely, after beating Georgia, particularly because of the dominating fashion in which Ole Miss did it. As far as the favorability of where Ole Miss sits, I think this is as good of a spot as you could’ve possibly asked for post-Georgia with three weeks remaining in the regular season. As it currently stands, and with the way this tournament is structured, Ole Miss is currently the last at-large team in the field. Four automatic bids are awarded to the four Power Four conference champions, seven at-large bids and one bid to the highest ranked Group of Five team (currently Boise State).
Does this make it a mathematical certainty that Ole Miss will make the playoff if it wins out? No, but putting Ole Miss at No. 11 immediately after beating Georgia, particularly since the committee slotted the Bulldogs behind the Rebels, makes it incredibly likely. Would it have been nice for Ole Miss to crack the top ten by jumping either Notre Dame or Alabama? Sure, but it’s tough to gripe about where Ole Miss is situated given its current resumé. I think you could aptly describe the Rebels’ situation as one in which they mostly control their own destiny. Two wins and they are likely in. Not a guarantee, but close to it.
There’s always the possibility the Rebels get jumped while sitting idle this week. Two weeks ago, Texas A&M was demolished by South Carolina and debuted at No. 14 in the rankings. After a bye, the Aggies fell one spot this week due to being jumped by Ole Miss. It’s certainly possible that happens to the Rebels this week, but doesn’t feel nearly as likely given that Ole Miss beat the team directly behind it, two spots behind it is the highest-ranked group of five team in Boise State — whose ranking doesn’t matter a ton as long as the Broncos remain the highest-ranked G5 team — and that the next two teams behind the Rebels (SMU and Texas A&M) don’t play opponents worthy of making a large leap.
I think Ole Miss is also going to greatly benefit from recency bias. It’s clear that, outside of the four automatic bids, there isn’t really a rhyme or reason to the committee’s ranking process. They seem to lap up narratives like a drug and I think Ole Miss’ narrative of being this wildly talented team that has had a resurgence, found the best version of itself and saved its season is going to benefit the Rebels. I think their current ranking is already a reflection of that. Above all else, my confidence in Ole Miss making the playoff if it takes care of business in the final two games, lie in the fact that the committee, while far from perfect and often contradicting itself, does value the eye test above all else. It seems to have a desire to pick the four best teams. While I didn’t agree with the decision at the time, the committee leaving undefeated Florida State out of the four-team playoff last year after the Seminoles lost star quarterback Jordan Travis for the season in their penultimate regular season game tells me they value getting who they view as the *current* best teams in.
While I am glad the playoff expanded and college football took one baby step forward in terms of having a postseason that makes an ounce of sense, I still find this system to mostly be a farce. And while I don’t agree that recency bias should exist and think penalizing teams for losing late in the year versus early is silly, it does matter in reality. And Ole Miss being the hot team down stretch will work to its benefit. Should the Rebels handle business, their last loss will come nearly 60 days prior to the final selection show. With a bye and two games Ole Miss should win handily, the lasting image of this team in the minds of the committee will be pummeling the gold standard of the sport, Georgia, rather than walking off the field in somber defeat at any point in the season’s final month. That matters, even if it shouldn’t in theory.
Now, onto the teams you should root for.
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Ole Miss-focused rooting guide: version 1
I have gotten a ton of questions about who to root for this weekend and over the final weeks of the season. Being a man of the people, I took a stab at explaining Ole Miss’ fans rooting interest in the games this weekend. Before we dive into this, I should preface all of this by saying, this is far from an exact science. In a 12-team tournament that includes five automatic bids and seven invitations and more than two dozen teams vying for those spots, it becomes a subjective clusterf*ck. So, if you read any of these opinions and think I picked the wrong team to root for — you could very well be correct. I waffled on at least two of these for most of the week. I just did my best to sift through these and find a logical rooting outcome. Let’s dive in.
No. 3 Texas at Arkansas, 11 AM CT (ABC). Rooting interest: Arkansas
We’ll start with an easy one here. You should root for Arkansas and Sam Pittman to pull the upset here. Why? Texas has had a remarkably weak schedule to this point in the season. The Longhorns being ranked No. 3 in this week’s Playoff ranking became the main gripe of the general public. We’re two weeks into November and the Texas Longhorns have played one road SEC game — and that road game was at Vanderbilt. How is that possible? It’s no fault of the Longhorns. They’re only playing the schedule bestowed upon them. This was the year the Red River Showdown (a neutral site game between Oklahoma and Texas played at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas) counted as a road game for the Longhorns. Texas has only played one ranked opponent this year (not totally fair given that Vandy was ranked when it played them, as was Michigan). That opponent was Georgia and the Bulldogs essentially KO’d the Longhorns in one half on their own home field. An early-season win at a highly-ranked Michigan has lost its luster as the Wolverines have floundered to a 5-5 record.
I point all of this out to say that, while Ole Miss would generally like to avoid there being a log jam of 10-2 SEC teams at the end of the year, a Longhorns loss to Arkansas would put Texas at two losses with a game against two-loss Texas A&M still looming in the season’s final week. I also presume a Texas loss would somehow improve Ole Miss’ minuscule chances of making the SEC Championship game, but I am not smart enough to sift through the insane tie-breaker matrix involved with that and I am not sure I can make a convincing argument that Ole Miss even wants to be in the SEC Championship game at this point. With the Rebels having two losses, that’s essentially just one more potential elimination game for a team that’s been playing elimination games for over a month.
Plus, with Texas’ weak schedule and a week of the committee hearing how stupid they are for ranking the Horns that high, I am curious to see how far Texas would fall if it suffered a second loss.
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Virginia at No. 8 Notre Dame, 2:30 PM CT (NBC). Rooting interest: Virginia
I personally find Notre Dame to be incredibly annoying. This isn’t 1975 anymore. Join a conference. Yes, I understand it would work against the Irish’s best interest to do that in football, but we already have enough subjective chaos in this mess of a system. Trying to properly rate a team whose half-century’s old brand is the main reason we continuously talk about them as a power, playing a random hodge-podge of opponents and five ACC opponents per year is just nonsense. You shouldn’t be able to half-ass join a conference. Notre Dame beat Texas A&M in College Station in week 1 and has since beaten a ranked Louisville team and a Navy squad that was ranked at the time of the match-up. But the Irish lost to Northern Illinois at home a week after beating the Aggies. I think losing to a MAC school at home should disqualify you from making the playoff, but to Notre Dame’s credit, it has three pretty good wins. With that said, Notre Dame won’t survive a second loss.
The Irish play Virginia, at USC and a ranked Army team in the final three games. Another Irish loss would significantly benefit Ole Miss because it would eliminate them from playoff consideration. Plus, any team that beats the troops twice and rides a pedestrian schedule to the playoff is downright anti-American.
No. 23 Missouri at No. 21 South Carolina, 3:15 PM CT (SECN). Rooting interest: South Carolina
Missouri is a two loss team that is sort of in the playoff conversation due to a weak schedule, no quality wins, and the eye test consensus being that the Tigers are an average football team. South Carolina, on the other hand, is a three-loss team ranked ahead of Missouri (that should tell you all you need to know about what the committee thinks of Mizzou). The Gamecocks are playing as well as any team in college football and have more than a puncher’s chance of finishing the season 9-3 and being the three-loss team shouting that they belong in the playoff if it’s ‘truly about the 12 best teams’. Due to the way the season has shaken out the flawed scheduling model in the SEC (and other conferences, too), South Carolina has no real shot to make it. But the more the Gamecocks win, the better Ole Miss’ resumé looks. The Rebels stomped the Gamecocks in Columbia. At the time, it was viewed as the Rebels avoiding a land mine. Six weeks later, it is shaping up to look like a quality road win for Ole Miss.
No. 7 Tennessee at No. 12 Georgia, 6:30 PM CT (ABC). Rooting interest: Tennessee
Here’s the one that’s been furiously debated all week. Again, I admit my argument could be wrong and flawed. Ole Miss throttled Georgia, 28-10 last week in a game in which the final score could have likely been more lopsided in Ole Miss’ favor. It’s undoubtedly the best win of the Rebels’ season and is among the best wins among any team in college football. Would you really want to have the quality of that win diluted by Georgia losing another game? If you’d asked me this on Monday, I would have agreed and told you to root for Georgia. But, after the rankings were released on Tuesday evening and Georgia was slotted behind Ole Miss, my thinking changed.
Think about what your expectations were at the beginning of the season: if Ole Miss goes 10-2, presumably with losses at LSU and to Georgia, the Rebels will make the College Football Playoff, right? Hand up, I thought the same thing. But seemingly no one factored in — including the de facto cartel bosses that govern a decentralized sport in desperate need of unified leadership — was the idea that expanding these conferences to 16-plus teams without adding more conference games would create a logjam in the standings with no sufficient way to determine supremacy aside from a multi-tiered tiebreaker system that the legislators likely never thought would go past the second tear when they wrote it. Because of that, I am not sure Ole Miss is realistically in this playoff discussion had it beat Kentucky but lost to LSU and Georgia. Last Saturday’s win gave the Rebels real legitimacy as an elite team that can match up and dominate other teams with elite talent. I am not sure what the public perception of the Rebels would be if they lost to LSU and Georgia and basically had a South Carolina win as the gleaning feather in their cap.
The largest obstacle Ole Miss is currently facing is standing out among five other SEC teams with two conference losses and five SEC teams with two losses overall (not the same five teams). There are a couple very plausible scenarios in which the SEC could end up with a five-way or six-way tie for second place (or even first place!) in the conference by season’s end. So, generally speaking, Ole Miss needs as many teams as humanly possible to suffer a third overall loss or third conference loss to disintegrate this potential logjam.
At this point, you might be thinking ‘didn’t this idiot just argue for Texas to suffer a second loss and join the logjam?’ Yes, I did. But for entirely different reasons. I don’t think Texas’ resumé will hold up with two losses unless it wins the SEC — which it still very well could..? I think? I have never been accused of being smart, and deciphering through all of this makes my head hurt.
To conclude why I picked Tennessee as the team to root for is that, generally speaking, I think Ole Miss needs as many teams as possible to take a third loss and bow out from this circus. I’ll frame it this way: with the games Ole Miss has remaining, considering it is currently the last team in the field as things stand right now, are you more concerned with the teams ahead of the Rebels? Or, are you more concerned with them being jumped by teams behind them? I lean toward the latter, and if Georgia loses a third game, it will be out of the discussion. I think that’s more directly beneficial to Ole Miss than this vague concept that a third Georgia loss will dilute the quality of that win for the Rebels. We all (committee included) saw with our own eyeballs the talent on the field on both sides last Saturday and we saw which team prevailed. Eliminate the logjam by eliminating Georgia.
If you’re reading this thinking Georgia winning helps Ole Miss, you might be right. I don’t think either outcome is overly detrimental to the Rebels at all. I am also just some schmuck with a newsletter that you subscribe to for a $0.00 monthly fee.
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No. 22 LSU at Florida, 2:30 PM CT (ABC). Rooting interest: Florida
LSU is an average football team that was exposed by Alabama last week as such. While the Kentucky loss is the most glaring wart on Ole Miss’ resumé, the loss to the Tigers in Baton Rouge, in the manner that it occurred, is the one that stings a bit more for fans. But, as we discussed earlier above, and earlier this week, the path for Ole Miss to get to the playoff with a 10-2 record likely had to include a win over Georgia, so whatever.
I hate math and hate tiebreakers, but I am told by others in this industry and on the internet that there is a very plausible scenario in which LSU can win out and still make the SEC Championship game. Here’s the full explanation. It’s far from unlikely. While the Rebels lost to the Tigers, I really don’t think it matters if LSU fades down the stretch in terms of weakening Ole Miss’ resumé. I think you need whatever voodoo magic those cajuns can drum up to still make the SEC title game and steal a bid to be eliminated. Think about it from a college basketball standpoint. If you’re a bubble team entering conference tournament week, you’re rooting for one-bid leagues to have the favorite win that league. Like if a ranked Memphis team was still in Conference-USA, you’d want them to win their conference tournament, because you don’t want some random team to upset them, win the tournament, get the automatic bid and that ranked Memphis team to take up an at-large bid. It ‘steals a bid’ and shrinks the field, if that makes any sense. That is what LSU would be doing at this point if it made it to the SEC Championship game and won — stealing a bid and shrinking the field. There’s zero chance LSU would make the playoff unless it wins the SEC.
D.J. Lagway is apparently going to be healthy enough to play in this game, so I suppose there is a small chance?
Kansas at No. 6 BYU, 9:15 CT (ESPN). Rooting interest: Kansas
BYU is undefeated, sits atop the BIG 12 standings and appears to be poised to win the league. Two-loss Colorado sits one game behind them in the BIG 12 standings (5-1). You’re rooting for BYU to take a loss here because if everything remains as it is in the BIG 12 standings, Colorado will face BYU in the conference championship game. If Colorado were to win that, the Buffaloes would receive an automatic bid into the playoff and there would be a furious debate about BYU deserving an at-large bid as a one-loss team that finished the regular season undefeated but lost a de facto bonus game that other one-loss teams did not have to play because they didn’t win their respective leagues. And make no mistake — BYU would have a valid argument. These conference championship games are another weird, somewhat nonsensical element in this broken system as we discussed before.
If BYU entered the BIG 12 championship game as a one-loss team, it would not matter who won that game because, based on how the committee has reflected its views in the rankings, a two-loss BIG 12 team is not getting an at-large bid.
Take this rooting guide as gospel because I am clearly a genius who knows all.
Thank you for reading as always. We’ll have more thoughts on Sunday.
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I have to go with the dawgs. Hope it works out.