First CFP Rankings Come Out Tuesday at 7 P.M. — and Miami Is Expected to Debut at No. 1
Election Night has a second countdown. At 7 p.m. Eastern on ESPN, the playoff committee unveils its first Top 25 — with the 8-0 Hurricanes projected on top and Saturday's trip to Notre Dame already looming over both teams.
Tuesday night in America belongs to two reveals, and only one of them is an election. At 7 p.m. Eastern, in the same hour Florida's polls close, the College Football Playoff selection committee unveils its first rankings of the season on ESPN — the first official step toward the 12-team playoff. USA TODAY's preview of the reveal puts the expectation plainly: Miami is expected to debut at No. 1. The Hurricanes earned the projection the hard way, surviving North Carolina 38-35 on the road in Week 9 to reach 8-0, one year after sneaking into the playoff as the No. 10 seed and advancing all the way to the national championship game.
The ranking, if it lands as projected, lasts four days before it is tested. Saturday sends Miami to South Bend to face Notre Dame, which bounced back from its loss to BYU with a 35-13 thumping of Navy and sits No. 4 in the AP poll. For the Irish the stakes are structural: a loss is already on the resume, there is no conference championship game to repair it with, and a home loss to the committee's No. 1 would leave almost no path back. The AP poll and the committee are different bodies with different habits — the AP has Georgia second and Utah third — and Tuesday's hour-long reveal is the first evidence of how the committee itself weighs Miami's unbeaten record against one-loss resumes.
The rest of the board has its own race. Boise State held off Texas State 46-45 to remain the front-runner for the highest-ranked Group of 6 spot, the playoff berth that turns one mid-major season into a national one. The reveal schedule after Tuesday is weekly — November 10, 17 and 24, December 1 — until Selection Sunday on December 6. Miami's players will learn their number the way everyone else does: on television, Tuesday at 7. What they do with it gets decided Saturday in South Bend.
