NASA, college football and the UCF-Houston battle for the skies
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Dave Wilson
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Dave Wilson
ESPN Staff Writer
- Dave Wilson is an editor for ESPN.com since 2010. He previously worked at The Dallas Morning News, San Diego Union-Tribune and Las Vegas Sun.
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Ryan McGee
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Ryan McGee
ESPN Senior Writer
- Senior writer for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com
- 2-time Sports Emmy winner
- 2010, 2014 NMPA Writer of the Year
ON A WARM September night last year, after a 27-10 UCF win over Georgia Tech, the crowd hung around to see something that only happens at the Bounce House.
Shortly after the game ended, a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center, about 35 miles due east from campus in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at NASA’s Launch Complex 39A.
Fans in the stadium got a perfect view of the launch because, by design, UCF’s 50-yard-line sits on the same latitude as the launch pad. As Elton John’s “Rocket Man” played over the stadium speakers, the video board showed a close-up of the spacecraft as it left the Earth’s atmosphere, with fans cheering along. Just another day at SpaceU.
UCF is all-in on space. Founded in 1963 as Florida Technological University with the motto “Reach For The Stars,” it opened in 1968 with an emphasis on providing talent for America’s ambitious space program. Now, with UCF grads making up about 30% of all Kennedy Space Center employees, the university is proudly touting its space connections.
To celebrate that legacy, the football team has played a wildly popular “Space Game” every year since 2017, featuring alternate uniforms with their own distinct color — called Canaveral Blue to reflect the coastal skies and water — and a small nod to the school’s original mascot, the Citronaut, a Florida orange wearing a space suit. It’s one of the coolest modern traditions in college football.
But it did raise the eyebrows of a new conference foe.
“Some blue unis … Some Space City thing,” Houston coach Dana Holgorsen said last week during his radio show. “I thought we were Space City.”
Houston, which is playing its first season in the Big 12 alongside UCF, represents a city that has long taken pride in its role as NASA’s nerve center at Johnson Space Center. Around the same time that UCF was being constructed, Houston was building the Astrodome, home to the Astros and another newfangled invention, Astroturf. (The Houston Rockets were actually named while the franchise was based in San Diego, oddly enough.)
So you’ll forgive Holgorsen if he needs to be educated when he’s told that UCF’s claim as a space hub is due to its proximity to NASA’s Launch Control Center, when Houston is home to Mission Control, the site of one of the most famous lines in the history of the space race.
“They don’t say ‘Orlando, we’ve got a problem,'” Holgorsen said.
With the upcoming departures of Texas and Oklahoma, two of the most storied teams in college football, the Big 12 is desperately in need of some new squabbles. Arizona and Arizona State will arrive next year with the Territorial Cup on the line. BYU, a new addition this year, will reunite with Utah next year in a rivalry that’s been played 101 times.
But while UCF and Houston might not ever become a heated rivalry due to their geographic separation on Earth, there’s a whole other frontier in the heavens. There is real school pride at stake. UCF fans are still rolling their eyes over the short-lived so-called “Civil ConFLiCT” that was forced upon them by UConn and essentially ended when the trophy went missing after two games.
While Houston and UCF have played each other 10 times, none before 2005, this one means something due to their connective tissue with the space program, not to mention they’re now conference opponents.
“We’re embracing it now,” UCF coach Gus Malzahn said earlier this year. “Every one of our roads on campus is named after a galaxy. The first month I got the job, I actually spoke to NASA on leadership and they had me Zoomed in to both groups [in Florida and Texas].”
And the eye in the sky is watching them as well.
“NASA has Space Act agreements with both schools,” said Wayne Saxer, the agency’s lead for sports engagement. “We work collaboratively with universities nationwide that bring innovative solutions and fresh perspectives to some of our biggest challenges.”
To celebrate both schools’ roles supporting America’s space agency, NASA flew a newly minted medallion featuring the logos of each school on opposing sides on CRS-29, a SpaceX mission to the International Space Station a couple of months ago.
Launched from Florida, guided by Houston, the medallion will come back to Earth, where it will be framed and presented to the winning team.
Welcome to the Space Wars.
THE TENSION BETWEEN the folks in Houston and Orlando nearly predates the cities themselves. It reaches back almost a century before the United States entered space with the launch of the Explorer I satellite on February 1, 1958, from Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 26.
In 1865, Jules Verne published “From the Earth to the Moon”, a tale of post-Civil War Americans who construct a spacecraft and launching device to fling a trio of travelers off this mortal coil and toward our nearest celestial neighbor. The French novelist was renowned for his imagination, but also for the research that kept his stories rooted in fact. He always included just the right amount of actual science to make his fantastical fiction seem plausible.
The book’s 10th chapter is titled “Florida and Texas.” Why? Because Verne predicted that the best location for a launch site would be between the equator and the 28th parallel, keeping it best in line with the Moon’s orbital path. Plus, the launch site would need to be built alongside a large body of water, so that debris wouldn’t fall into populated areas in the case of an accident.
With all that in mind, Verne writes about sparring would-be locations in Galveston Bay and “Tampa Town,” complete with lobbying of the government to land the launch pad, protests and rallies in the streets and barbs publicly traded between the two states.
Verne imagined Florida newspapers writing of Texas: “A fine bay; half-choked with sand!” And Texas responding: “Choked yourselves!”
Everything Verne wrote from his home in northern France became a reality nearly 100 years later and 5,000 miles away. NASA was founded after that Explorer I launch and established its primary launch location at the Cape, where the first version of Mission Control was housed in bunkers around the spaceport.
“It was basically a bunch of monitors and microphones in a pillbox,” John Glenn, an original seven Mercury astronaut-turned-U.S. Senator, recalled in 2014. “When we were assigned to CapCom, to talk to our colleague inside the spacecraft, to be in there at the Cape and feel those rockets going up right there and then in front of you, it was remarkable on every level. But it was cramped for space. And yes, I realize the irony of using that word just now.”
On Sept. 12, 1962, John F. Kennedy doubled down on a challenge that he had first pitched to a joint session of Congress one year earlier, that an American should set foot on the Moon before decade’s end. He said those words — in Houston — while standing on the field at Rice Stadium, famously adding: “But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? … We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Once Kennedy announced his moonshot, a literal overnight fight began regarding the location of NASA’s new HQ, the spot for Mission Control. Those already living in Florida believed it should stay there — NASA could simply construct some new buildings — but they found themselves battling dozens of cities for NASA’s favor. Cities from St. Louis to Langley, Virginia, to San Francisco to Shreveport, Louisiana, submitted HQ proposals.
“My favorite was Bogalusa, Louisiana,” says Rick Houston, NASCAR sportswriter-turned-NASA historian and co-author of “Go, Flight! The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control.” “Can you imagine that one? ‘Bogalusa, we’ve have a problem.'”
As part of the region’s push to prove its worthiness, Florida governor Farris Bryant signed into law Senate Bill No. 125, creating a new state university in east central Florida with the goal of supporting the Cape. The school was named Florida Tech, and though it had no sports teams yet, it did have a mascot, a helmet-wearing Jetsons-inspired spaceman with a Florida orange for a body. They called him the Citronaut.
“I love the Citronaut,” confesses Tennessee athletic director Danny White, who served in the same capacity at the school Florida Tech became, UCF, from 2015 to 2021. White, who moved his office into the football stadium where he could watch rocket launches going up from the Cape, greenlit the Citronaut’s return for UCF’s first Space Games in 2018 and ’19. “The instant you see him, you feel like you’re back in the 1960’s Space Age.”
The end result was a punt. Launch operations would remain at the Cape and with it Launch Control at Kennedy Space Center. But that setup didn’t last for long. Beginning with the Gemini 4 flight of June 1965, communication and control shifted to Mission Control, located on the seemingly endless grounds of Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake, Texas, directly in between Houston and Jules Verne’s Galveston Bay. What made the shift happen? A lot of, well, space that was handed to NASA for free via a donation by the same school where JFK’s speech is still memorialized on a plaque that hangs in the stadium where JT Daniels will spend his weekend fighting for a sixth win and bowl eligibility against Florida Atlantic.
“I mean, I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade here, but if we are talking about space schools, then there’s really one, right?” astronaut Shannon Walker half-joked earlier this year. Walker is a Houston native who has spent 330 days in orbit and holds three degrees from Rice, one of the school’s 13 astronauts. “Go Owls.”
When asked if there is still beef between the Cape and Houston about the decision to move Mission Control west, Rick Houston audibly huffs. “When I was working on my book and interviewing all of the NASA legends, the Florida guys all said the same thing to me. ‘Now, when are you going to write a book about the real Mission Control?'”
HOUSTON, OF COURSE, has a problem with this.
For more than 50 years, the university system has partnered with NASA, including creating a campus in Clear Lake adjacent to Johnson Space Center since its opening in 1961 “to meet a vital demand for trained engineers, physicists and mathematicians to join the U.S. space program,” according to the university.
Last year, Houston chancellor Renu Khator signed an extension with NASA for all the system’s universities to extend a partnership to “advance human spaceflight.”
“Houston is ‘Space City,’ so it’s important for students and faculty in relevant disciplines across the UH system to have opportunities to engage in and be exposed to real-world space flight-related research and technology development with NASA,” Khator said.
Dr. Olga Bannova, formerly an architect in Moscow, is the director of Houston’s Sasakawa Center for Space Architecture, the only master’s level program of its kind in the world.
“It’s obviously about human spaceflight, but also about psychology,” Dr. Bannova said. “It’s about understanding human needs and providing and thinking about the ways how we can make a human life not only sustainable in space, but also really rewarding, you know?”
One of those ways, Bannova says, is to provide “a complementary countermeasure against all these negative effects on the human physiology and psychology that’s associated with microgravity conditions.”
For those of us who don’t speak scientist, basically that means one component is the possibility of sports in space.
Adam Doll, one of Bannova’s graduate students, is already an engineer for NASA in Houston who does astronaut training and when he’s not pondering spacesuit development, is working on his master’s thesis on the idea of collaborative sports in some interstellar habitat. Nothing too rowdy. Think a collaborative rock climbing-type course with an objective to complete it as fast as possible. Not a future Cougars-Knights battle in the cosmos.
“You don’t want the games to get too competitive in space,” Doll said.
But down here, it’s all fair game.
“I don’t even know where UCF is, to be honest. And we have the astronauts in Houston,” Doll said. “That’s a big thing. They live here and train here. They just go out there [to Florida] to launch. I mean, they only use that every once in a while. Mission Control is manned 24/7. We always have people monitoring the space station.”
That would explain why legendary NASA flight director Gene Kranz, who oversaw the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, including the first moon landing (and was portrayed by Ed Harris in “Apollo 13”), said the Florida-Texas grandstanding has evolved over the years.
“That may be a current-day rivalry, but that was not the case back through the programs that I supported,” Kranz, who is 90 and lives near Houston, said. “I think it may have come about once we started putting astronauts as center directors down at the Cape.”
No matter which side you’re on, the Knights are way ahead in embracing the SpaceU moniker. Every single sport at UCF has an alternate SpaceU/Citronauts jersey. And it’s good for business.
“Every year, people want to see when the first game is and then when the Space Game is,” said Jimmy Skiles, one of the senior athletic directors at UCF and the chief branding officer. “It’s become just this whole event in itself. I think we are the only college fan base in the country that is willing to accept an alternate mascot and alternate color and even an alternate name for the university — SpaceU — for a single game.”
It’s evident annually, seeing a split fan base wearing black and gold and another huge section of the stadium wearing blue, such as during the 45-3 upset of Oklahoma State two weeks ago.
“That’s never been one of our colors,” Skiles said. “It’s a color we created as part of our space brand. And yet we had 25,000 people wearing Canaveral Blue.” Skiles said eight of their top 10 best-selling merchandise items each year are all space-related.
The other thing fans love about the Space Game? UCF dominates every time. This year, a 4-5 UCF team that had just one Big 12 win crushed No. 15 OSU, moving to 7-0 all time in Space Games with a 202-point margin of victory. Fans switch from “Go Knights!” to “Go ‘Nauts!” for the annual event. It’s almost enough to start an identity crisis.
can ‘Naut lose
+202 point differential all-time in Space Games pic.twitter.com/MtdLIR5Kk5
— UCF Football (@UCF_Football) November 12, 2023
“Our whole fan base accepts the switch on the Space U/Citronauts thing, but so many people are like, ‘It’s time to rebrand to Citronauts full time,” Skiles said. “And then you have the Knights loyalists that are like, ‘Absolutely not, we are Knights. Our colors are black and gold.'”
Whatever they’re called, Houston isn’t giving up the Space City name, and UCF isn’t giving up the SpaceU name. And UCF is ready for Houston to hold up its end of the bargain in the burgeoning rivalry.
Skiles said in 2019, UCF approached UH to invite them to do their own alternate uniforms for UCFs’ Space Game when the Cougars visited Orlando. He knew he probably didn’t give Houston enough time to go all in, but he thought maybe they’d do a themed helmet, like UCF did with its hand-painted helmets resembling the moon’s dark and light sides, complete with craters.
“That was the 50th year of Apollo mission, the moon landing,” Skiles said. “We thought it’d be a really cool thing to have both of us do something. And it came game week and Houston didn’t do it.”
This time around, Houston is excited about visiting UCF as conference rivals, perhaps with a future trophy on the line.
“It is something we’re tracking on, trust me,” Houston athletic director Chris Pezman said. “It’s logical. It should have happened a long, long time ago. It’s something we’ve been working on for a few years. Now it’s time to get it going.”
Eric DeSalvo, UCF’s associate athletic director for content, remembers when he was a student at the school between 2005 and 2009 and could feel the ground rumble when space shuttles would launch at Canaveral. Seeing rockets launch from his own stadium never gets old, he said.
“It’s like a core memory you’ll always remember, being able to see a launch with thousands of your favorite fans,” DeSalvo said. “This season opener, we’re beating Kent State and right as the clock expired a [SpaceX] launch was going up. It’s so cool. It’s not every day you get to see that.”
So inside the building at UCF, they were excited to hear Holgorsen’s dig. It felt like liftoff for the two teams’ future in their own space race.
“Dana, where’s this been the whole time?” said Eric DeSalvo, UCF’s associate athletic director for content. “Why’d you wait until last week for that comment? We needed this.”
With two weeks left in the regular season, the playoff picture is coming into focus. At this point, the top six teams in the rankings seem like near locks. The ACC and the Group of 5 will supply champions, too, whether the Big Ten likes it or not. The winner of a Week 13 showdown between USC and Oregon should be on track for a bid, and it’s hard to imagine, at this point, that Notre Dame is left out, given its No. 9 ranking with just lowly Syracuse and Stanford left on the schedule.
Add it all up, and that’s 10 of the 12 playoff spots already written in — well, if not in ink, at least a really dark pencil.
That leaves the teams still lurking on the periphery — Alabama, Oklahoma, Utah, Vanderbilt, BYU and Miami, chief among them — hoping each week that the committee will dig deep, focus on their strengths, set aside the occasional hiccups and value their ever-evolving résumés.
And each week, the committee just updates last week’s rankings with a few small tweaks and is back at the airport in time to grab a Cinnabon before their flight.
So, yes, there are some nerves, some frustration, and a good bit of anger as we head toward the finish line of the 2025 season.
Would you believe that Alabama, Oregon and Notre Dame have combined for five wins against other ranked teams?
It’s true.
Alabama has beaten No. 4 Georgia, No. 14 Vanderbilt, No. 20 Tennessee and No. 22 Missouri.
Notre Dame has beaten … well, only No. 15 USC.
And Oregon has a big win against … sorry, it just says “Error 404: Page Not Found.”
And yet, the Tide check in at No. 10 this week, barely on the fringe of the playoff, behind both the Ducks and the Irish.
Why? Because Alabama had the temerity to lose a game last week by two points — a game in which it missed a field goal attempt on a controversial tipped ball, nearly doubled Oklahoma’s yardage, and, based on net success rates, was clearly the unluckiest team in the country.
📊🏈DID WE REALLY GET BEAT THAT BAD?
NET SUCCESS RATES IN WEEK 12By Request:
FIRST HALF NET SUCCESS RATE: South Carolina +.168
SECOND HALF NET SUCCESS RATE: Texas A&M +.391 pic.twitter.com/x1JWyTNlpS— parker fleming (@statsowar) November 17, 2025
Now, way back when we first introduced the idea of the selection committee in 2014, one of the big differentiations from more traditional rankings, like the AP poll, was that this new group would view each week with fresh eyes. Unlike those lazy AP voters or whichever intern drew the short straw and had to submit a coach’s ballot for the Coaches Poll, the committee wouldn’t simply take last week’s rankings and adjust based on who won or lost their most recent games. The underlying data changed each week, so the committee was obliged to reevaluate, too. Teams lost games when they played well and won games when they played poorly. What once seemed like a big win (Penn State?) now looks less impressive, and what once felt like a bad loss (SMU?) is an excusable gap on the résumé. The committee, in its infinite wisdom, would account for all that by viewing each set of rankings as a wholly new endeavor.
Twelve years later, this committee seems to have decided that’s way too much effort and seems to have adopted the old AP poll process.
Alabama lost. It must be punished, and dropping six spots in the rankings is the rough equivalent of the pilot at ATL explaining it’ll just be another 20 minutes or so before a gate opens up. Everyone knows it’s not true, but the hope is the number seems reasonable enough to avoid anyone getting too upset.
Well, that kind of treatment might be OK for the likes of Miami or Virginia, but this is Alabama we’re talking about. Put some respect on the Tide’s name. Their five wins vs. SP+ top-40 opponents is more than anyone except Texas A&M. Their four wins vs. ranked foes is more than Ole Miss, Oregon and Notre Dame combined. They’ve beaten the No. 4 team in the country head-to-head — arguably the best win for any team this season.
And yet, here we are, treating Alabama as if it has been playing an ACC schedule this whole time. (Never mind that the Tide lost to an ACC team. The committee has given Week 1 the “Eternal Sunshine” treatment. Sorry, Miami.)
The whole point of the committee — the reason we’re not using computers or the AP poll or letting that manatee at Sea World who always picks the winner of the Holiday Bowl decide on the playoff teams — is so there’s some nuance to this process.
Alabama at No. 10 shows there’s no context being applied. Take last week’s rankings. Cut and paste and drop anyone who lost six spots. Now no one on the committee has to worry about missing a dinner reservation on a Tuesday night.
Two weeks ago, Memphis was the committee’s favored Group of 5 team. The Tigers promptly lost to Tulane (and again to East Carolina last week.)
Last week, the nod went to South Florida. The Bulls then immediately lost to Navy.
This week, the committee had a chance to move away from courting the American and expand its horizons. It didn’t.
The case for Tulane is pretty simple. The Green Wave has a Power 4 win. Sure, it’s against Duke, a team that also lost to UConn, but it’s a Power 4 win nevertheless. Tulane also beat Memphis and East Carolina. That’s rarified air, shared only with the likes of UAB and NC State. This is a team with a real résumé.
But the thing is, James Madison didn’t choose its schedule. It faces the teams in its league, and in 2025, the Sun Belt isn’t as good.
So what? While Tulane has struggled with the likes of Army and South Alabama, JMU has beaten its seven conference foes by an average of 24 points. Of JMU’s nine wins, only Georgia State came by fewer than 10 points. In the past month, the Dukes have won all their four games by a combined score of 208-80. No, they haven’t played great competition, but they’re dominating the teams they do face. Quality of wins is a metric teams control. Strength of schedule is not.
3. Open dates
Two weeks ago, Georgia Tech took the week off, presumably, because the Ramblin’ Wreck was stuck in traffic on I-75, and somehow, despite being the rare ACC team that didn’t embarrass itself in Week 11, the Yellow Jackets were leapfrogged by Miami.
Last week, it was Vanderbilt that had a week off, presumably to scrub glitter and hot sauce off the field after renting out FirstBank Stadium to a bachelorette party. What happened? The Commodores, too, were jumped in the rankings by Miami.
So, to sum up: Miami’s head-to-head win over Notre Dame did not matter to the committee, but compared the Canes to a blank void, and the committee slightly favors Miami.
Let’s do a quick blind résumé here.
Team A: Best win vs. SP+ No. 20, next vs. No. 30. Losses to SP+ Nos. 12 and 13 by a combined 29 points. No. 14 strength of record.
Team B: Best win vs. SP+ No. 37, next vs. No. 51. Losses to SP+ Nos. 3 and 17 by a combined 27 points. No. 18 strength of record.
Who’s better?
Both have understandable losses. Neither has an elite win, but clearly Team A has beaten better teams. Neither exactly looks like playoff material at the moment, but Team A, for what it’s worth, still has a monster opportunity on the horizon.
OK, you’ve probably guessed Team A is Michigan. Team B is Utah, ranked six spots higher.
If anything, Utah’s spot in the rankings is confounding — ahead of Miami, USC and Vanderbilt, all with markedly better wins. But the frustration for the Wolverines is that they have a shot to knock off Ohio State again this year, and even if they do, the end result probably will look just like 2024. The Buckeyes will still cruise into the playoff, and Michigan — despite being far better than a year ago — doesn’t have much of a shot.
If Michigan was hovering around the No. 12 or 13 spot, there’s a path — with a win over Ohio State — to a playoff berth. At 18? Not likely, even if they beat the Buckeyes by 40. Instead, all they’ll be left with is a trip to the Music City Bowl and a long offseason, sipping on the tears of Ohio State fans everywhere. It’s hardly fair.
5. The committee
We’ll never quite know what’s discussed in the committee room, but this week, we imagine, as the hours ticked by, someone spoke up and said, “Well, we have to include Virginia, so put them at 19, and then let’s just draw names from a hat.”
Seriously, look at the bottom of these rankings. Who’s good? Tennessee? The Vols’ best win was a loss to Georgia. Illinois? Indiana beat Illinois so badly that the descendants of the 1916 Cumberland team sent condolence cards. Houston was housed by West Virginia less than three weeks ago. Missouri is like “Criminal Minds.” The Tigers pop up on the rankings, and your first thought is … “That’s still on? Didn’t Beau Pribula retire like six years ago?”
So, after spending so much time berating the committee for its limitless lack of creativity and nuance, it’s only fair we include those folks in the Anger Index. Finding 25 teams worth ranking is no easy task. But you know what they call the person who graduates last in medical school? Doctor.
Also angry this week: East Carolina Pirates (7-3, unranked), North Texas Mean Green (9-1, unranked), Notre Dame Fighting Irish (8-2, No. 9 and really wanting everyone to stop mentioning that Miami game), Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets (9-1, No. 16 behind seven two-loss teams), Lane Kiffin’s realtor. Make up your mind already, Lane!
It’s time for Texas to pack up.
The Longhorns plummeted to No. 17 on Tuesday night in the College Football Playoff selection committee’s third of six rankings, indicating that even if they run the table and punctuate their résumé with a win against No. 3 Texas A&M, they might still be locked out.
Notre Dame, though, should buy some furniture and move in. At No. 9 — ahead of No. 10 Alabama — the selection committee continued to reward the two-loss Irish for how they’re playing — not who they’re beating. No. 10 Alabama has four wins against CFP top-25 opponents, including the committee’s No. 4 team Georgia, No. 14 Vanderbilt, No. 20 Tennessee and No. 22 Mizzou, which snuck back into the ranking this week. Notre Dame’s only win against a CFP-ranked team is against No. 15 USC.
While the changes at the top were minimal, No. 24 Tulane is now the flavor of the week in the Group of 5 race after Navy knocked South Florida out of the same spot.
With only three Saturdays remaining before Selection Day, there are still games that can change the picture entirely, which leaves hope for some teams hovering on the bubble (here’s lookin’ at you, Miami).
The Bubble Watch accounts for what we have learned from the committee so far — and historical knowledge of what it means for teams clinging to hope. Teams with Would be in status below are in this week’s bracket based on the committee’s third ranking. For each Power 4 conference, we’ve also listed Last team in and First team out. These are the true bubble teams hovering around inclusion. Teams labeled Still in the mix haven’t been eliminated, but have work to do. A team that is Out will have to wait until next year.
The conferences below are listed in order of the number of bids they would receive, ranked from the most to least, based on this week’s committee ranking.
Jump to a conference:
ACC | Big 12 | Big Ten
SEC | Independent | Group of 5
Bracket
SEC
Would be in: Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Ole Miss, Texas A&M
Last team in: Alabama. The loss to Oklahoma didn’t knock the Tide out of the committee’s top 12, but it put No. 10 Alabama in must-win mode and will keep them ranked behind the Sooners. The Tide have only one SEC loss and still have the best chance of any team to reach the conference championship game (71.6%), according to ESPN Analytics.
First team out: Vanderbilt. No. 14 Vandy jumped ahead of the three-loss Longhorns despite the head-to-head loss to Texas, but remains a long shot for the field as an at-large bid. The Commodores would need to beat Kentucky and Tennessee — plus hope there is some chaos above them. Maybe — maybe — if Bama loses to Auburn in the Iron Bowl, Miami loses to Pitt, and BYU loses to Cincinnati — it can open the door, but clearly multiple things need to work in their favor.
Still in the mix: None.
Out: Arkansas, Auburn, Florida, Kentucky, LSU, Mississippi State, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas
Big Ten
Would be in: Indiana, Ohio State, Oregon
Last team in: Oregon. This could change quickly if Oregon loses at home to USC on Saturday, as there are questions in the room about the Ducks’ No. 31 schedule strength. The Nov. 8 win at Iowa was impressive, but the Hawkeyes are now a four-loss team and dropped out of the top 25. The Ducks also have a double-digit home loss to Indiana, which is why their chances of reaching the Big Ten title game are only 12%.
First team out: USC. Like Oregon, USC just boosted its résumé with a gritty, close win against a talented Iowa team that fell out of the ranking with its fourth loss. The Trojans’ two losses were by a total of 12 points to Illinois and Notre Dame — and were both on the road. USC has a critical win against No. 18 Michigan, which boosts its status and gives the Trojans a tiebreaker in the Big Ten standings. If USC can win at Oregon (and avoid an embarrassing home loss to UCLA), the Trojans can unseat the Ducks as the Big Ten’s last team in. They would likely finish behind Notre Dame, though, because of the head-to-head result.
Still in the mix: Michigan. The difference between No. 18 Michigan and No. 17 Texas is that the Wolverines are still mathematically eligible to reach the Big Ten title game with a 3.6% chance, according to ESPN Analytics. The Wolverines avoided elimination Saturday with a narrow 24-22 win at Northwestern. They still have a chance to beat the committee’s No. 1 team in rival Ohio State, and nobody in the country would have a better win if that happens. If Michigan can run the table, it would have one of the best two-loss résumés in the country but would be ranked behind USC unless the Trojans lose again. If USC loses to Oregon, and Oregon loses to Washington — and Michigan runs the table — the Wolverines will have a strong case to be the Big Ten’s third team in. The Week 2 loss to Oklahoma looks better now that the Sooners are a top-10 team.
Out: Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Michigan State, Minnesota, Nebraska, Northwestern, Penn State, Purdue, Rutgers, UCLA, Washington, Wisconsin
Big 12
Would be in: Texas Tech
Last team in: Texas Tech. At No. 5, the Red Raiders are within arm’s reach of a first-round bye and have the best chance of winning the Big 12 (69.5%), according to ESPN Analytics. Texas Tech has a bye this week but can clinch a spot in the Big 12 title game if both Cincinnati and Arizona State lose. The Oct. 18 loss to Arizona State won’t keep Texas Tech out of the CFP if it finishes as a two-loss Big 12 runner-up, given how highly the committee has regarded Texas Tech to this point. The chances of that became even better after Arizona State appeared in the ranking at No. 25, easing some of the pain of that loss. The Red Raiders end the regular season at 4-7 West Virginia.
First team out: BYU. The Cougars put it all together during Saturday’s dominant win against TCU, but they would be excluded from the playoff today in order to make room for one of the five highest ranked conference champions. BYU still has the second-best chance to reach the Big 12 title game (80.2%) behind Texas Tech (97.5%). They can clinch a spot with a win Saturday against Cincinnati and losses by both Arizona State and Houston. If BYU wins the league, it’s a CFP lock. If BYU loses, though, it would depend on how close the game is. The selection committee is unlikely to reward BYU with an at-large bid if it plays as poorly as it did against Texas Tech during the regular season.
Still in the mix: Arizona State, Cincinnati, Utah. According to ESPN Analytics, Utah still has an 11.9% chance to reach the Big 12 championship, followed by ASU (8.4%) and Cincinnati (1.9%).
Out: Arizona, Baylor, Colorado, Houston, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, TCU, UCF, West Virginia
ACC
Would be in: Miami
Last team in: Miami. The No. 13 Canes are listed here because they are the selection committee’s highest-ranked ACC team and are still mathematically eligible to reach the conference championship game. Until the participants of that game are clear, the committee’s highest-ranked ACC team will continue to appear here. With six teams still in contention, the most fair representative is the committee’s. Still, Miami’s best chance at reaching the CFP right now is through an at-large bid because the Canes only have a 7.1% chance to reach the ACC title game. To get that at-large bid, Miami still needs to beat both Virginia Tech and Pitt and hope for losses above it to move into the top 10. The ACC champion will earn the No. 11 seed and the Group of 5 champion will have the No. 12 seed, so Miami needs to jump to No. 10 by Selection Day. It’s not inconceivable if Alabama loses to Auburn, BYU loses to Cincinnati and Utah loses to either K-State or at Kansas. It will take more than one of those things — if not all three. The question will be if the committee ever revisits Miami’s head-to-head win against Notre Dame in the season opener. The Canes would likely have to creep closer to the Irish in their ranking for them to be comparable enough to use that tiebreaker. Georgia Tech can clinch a spot in the game with a win against Pitt on Saturday, and Virginia can clinch with losses by Duke, Pitt and SMU.
First team out: Georgia Tech. The Yellow Jackets beat a 1-10 Boston College team by two points in spite of themselves and are a win away from a guaranteed appearance in the ACC championship game. They’ve also got a chance to earn a top-5 win in the regular-season finale against Georgia. If Georgia Tech doesn’t beat Georgia, it would need to win the ACC to reach the playoff because a three-loss ACC runner-up is out.
Still in the mix: Duke, Pitt, SMU, Virginia. Virginia has the best chance to reach the ACC title game (77.7%); SMU is third (38%), followed by Duke (11%), Miami and Pitt (7%).
Out: Boston College, Cal, Clemson, Florida State, Louisville, North Carolina, NC State, Stanford, Syracuse, Virginia Tech, Wake Forest
Independent
Would be in: Notre Dame. At No. 9 and ahead of two-loss Alabama, Notre Dame is winning the eye test, because it is ranked behind Alabama in both Strength of Record and Strength of Schedule. Alabama has the No. 4 schedule in the country, while the Irish are No. 29. Notre Dame’s best wins are against USC, Navy and Pitt, with only No. 15 USC ranked this week. As long as the Irish end the season with wins against Syracuse and Stanford, their place in the playoff should be secure.
Group of 5
Would be in: Tulane. The Green Wave have decent wins against Northwestern, Duke and Memphis, and the best combination of eye test and résumé of the current contenders. Tulane’s No. 71 schedule strength is better than James Madison (No. 119), North Texas (No. 127) and Navy (No. 74). Tulane and North Texas are the most likely teams to play for the American Conference championship, but North Texas has the best chance to win the league (61.4%), according to ESPN Analytics.
Still in the mix: James Madison, Navy, North Texas. Of these teams, JMU has the best strength of record (No. 24) and game control (No. 40) ranks, but the worst strength of schedule (No. 119). Navy has the best win — against South Florida — and the best loss (to Notre Dame), but lost to North Texas.
Bracket
Based on the committee’s third ranking, the seeding would be:
First-round byes
No. 1 Ohio State (Big Ten champ)
No. 2 Indiana
No. 3 Texas A&M (SEC champ)
No. 4 Georgia
First-round games
On campus, Dec. 19 and 20
No. 12 Tulane (American champ) at No. 5 Texas Tech (Big 12 champ)
No. 11 Miami (ACC champ) at No. 6 Ole Miss
No. 10 Alabama at No. 7 Oregon
No. 9 Notre Dame at No. 8 Oklahoma
Quarterfinal games
At the Goodyear Cotton Bowl, Capital One Orange Bowl, Rose Bowl presented by Prudential and Allstate Sugar Bowl on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1.
No. 12 Tulane/No. 5 Texas Tech winner vs. No. 4 Georgia
No. 11 Miami/No. 6 Ole Miss winner vs. No. 3 Texas A&M
No. 10 Alabama/No. 7 Oregon winner vs. No. 2 Indiana
No. 9 Notre Dame/No. 8 Oklahoma winner vs. No. 1 Ohio State
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Andrea Adelson
Ohio State, Indiana and Texas A&M remained the top three teams in the latest College Football Playoff rankings released Tuesday, while Alabama dropped six spots to No. 10 after its loss to Oklahoma.
The Crimson Tide are now behind No. 9 Notre Dame, even though they have more top-25 victories (four) than the Irish (one). Georgia, which Alabama beat in September, moved up to No. 4, while Texas Tech moved up to No. 5, Ole Miss to No. 6, Oregon to No. 7 and Oklahoma up three spots to No. 8 after its 23-21 win in Tuscaloosa.
BYU is ranked No. 11, followed by Utah at No. 12, Miami at No. 13, Vanderbilt at No. 14 and USC at No. 15. The Hurricanes jumped two spots after a 41-7 win over NC State, but they are four spots behind Notre Dame — a big point of contention among those at Miami and in the ACC. The two teams have the same 8-2 record, but Miami beat Notre Dame 27-24 to open the season.
Earlier this week, Miami coach Mario Cristobal was asked how head-to-head games should be viewed in CFP résumé comparisons and he said, “The No. 1 criteria is always head-to-head. It’s why we play the game, right? That always has been and always will be the No. 1 factor.”
The big difference between them is the losses: Notre Dame lost close games to two ranked teams (Miami and Texas A&M), and Miami lost to two unranked teams (Louisville, SMU).
Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek, who took over as the new selection committee chair following the resignation of Mack Rhoades, said that to this point, “we really haven’t compared those teams,” referring to Miami and Notre Dame. That said, if both teams were to end up in a comparable tier, then “head-to-head will be a significant data point,” according to Yurachek.
“They haven’t been in similar comparative pools to date,” Yurachek said. “But Miami is creeping up in that range where they will be compared to Notre Dame if something happens above them.”
Texas, meanwhile, saw its at-large hopes take a hit. The Longhorns tumbled seven spots to No. 17 after a 35-10 loss to Georgia dropped them to 7-3, moving behind No. 16 Georgia Tech. Michigan is No. 18, Virginia is No. 19 and Tennessee moved up three spots to No. 20.
Illinois, Missouri, Houston, Tulane and Arizona State round out the top 25.
The five highest-ranked conference champions will make the 12-team field, but there is a tweak to the format this year, as the committee is using a straight seeding model. The top four teams in the final ranking, regardless of conference championship, will receive a first-round bye.
If the playoffs were held today, these would be the first-round matchups: Tulane at Texas Tech; Miami at Ole Miss; Alabama at Oregon; Notre Dame at Oklahoma. While Miami is slotted in as the highest-ranked ACC team in the current rankings, the Hurricanes have long odds to win the conference title.
If Georgia Tech beats Pitt on Saturday, and Virginia beats Virginia Tech next week, those two teams would play for the ACC championship. The winner would earn the automatic berth as one of the five highest-ranked conference champions.
For Miami to advance to the ACC title game, the Hurricanes need to win out; have Virginia, Georgia Tech and SMU lose their remaining games; and have Duke lose one of its final two games. ESPN FPI currently gives Georgia Tech a 35.3% chance to win the ACC and Virginia a 32.7% chance.
The SEC led the way once again Tuesday with nine ranked teams, while the Big Ten has six, the Big 12 has five with the additions of Houston and Arizona State, and the ACC has three after Pitt dropped out following its 37-15 loss to Notre Dame. Tulane replaced USF as the top-ranked Group of 5 representative.
Even though Alabama dropped to No. 10, the Crimson Tide still have favorable odds to make the SEC championship game, which would all but guarantee a spot in the CFP no matter the result. According to ESPN Research, Alabama has a 71% chance to make it to Atlanta with only one SEC game remaining, at Auburn in the Iron Bowl.
Georgia is done with SEC play but would lose a tiebreaker to Alabama. If Texas A&M wins at Texas next weekend, the Aggies would clinch a spot in Atlanta.
In the Big Ten, Ohio State and Indiana are in good shape to make it into the CFP. There is a crucial conference game this weekend that will have major implications for the Big Ten and an at-large berth: No. 15 USC travels to play No. 7 Oregon.
In the Big 12, Texas Tech and BYU are the only two teams with one conference loss, so they would play for a conference title if they win out.
The final CFP rankings will be announced Dec. 7, the day after the conference championships. The four first-round games will be played at the home campuses of the higher-seeded teams on Dec. 19 and 20. The four quarterfinal games will be played at the Goodyear Cotton Bowl (Dec. 31), the Capital One Orange Bowl (Jan. 1), the Rose Bowl Game presented by Prudential (Jan. 1) and the Allstate Sugar Bowl (Jan. 1).
The two semifinal games will take place at the Vrbo Fiesta Bowl and the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl on Jan. 8 and 9, respectively.
The CFP National Championship game is Jan. 19 at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida.
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