Don’t fall for the College Football Playoff committee’s meaningless rankings

Welcome back to Tuesdays with the Nonsense Crew, an event so specifically concocted to inflame and yet so free of substance and importance that it defies logic why we pay attention at all.

And yet, once again, the College Football Playoff committee will hook us in tonight with the first reveal of its weekly rankings on ESPN. Moments afterwards, the pistons will start firing on a predictable cycle of accusing committee members of various biases, pointing out inconsistencies in the way they ranked the teams and then listening to chairman Gary Barty meander through a series of talking points designed by the CFP staff to make all of this sound very official and logically sound.

Instead, what we will actually get is reporters asking pointed, sometimes even anger-tinged questions that are batted back by phrases like “We looked at the entire body of work” and “data points” that are really just code for “We like this team better than that team.”

It’s infuriating. And we fall for it every time.

The first College Football Playoff rankings of the season are scheduled to be released Tuesday.

But we can make a different choice. Every year, we have the opportunity to do better. No matter which team you’re a fan of, there’s no need to let this process drive you nuts.

The dirty little secret of the CFP rankings is that until the conference championship games are played on Dec. 4, none of what’s said Tuesday matters even a little bit. This is the eighth year of the Playoff, and by now we know exactly how this is going to go.

After all the games are done, there will be five power conference champions. Any of those that have zero or one losses — a group that currently consists of 10 teams but will get smaller when some of them play each other — will be in good shape.

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That’s true even for Oklahoma, which…

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