Baylor’s upcoming schedule is so tough, the Bears’ Playoff ranking right now is meaningless

We are to the “weekly Playoff rankings” portion of the college football schedule, and I cannot recommend this enough: Don’t watch the explanations.

There is no need for weekly rankings. It is an idea driven totally by ratings, and it adds a fresh layer of fan anger to what is already the sport’s tensest month. But it does get ratings, and it will continue for as long as we have a Playoff (so, forever). So be it. But take it from someone who’s gotten a lot of practice in having to explain rankings: There’s no value in explaining.

There’s nothing Arkansas AD and committee chairman Jeff Long is going to be able to say to communicate how 1,430,386 moving pieces created a select set of slight changes to the rankings. Maybe it was because of a good or bad week on the field. Maybe it was because of “game control” or “team balance” or “consistent improvement” or whatever other awful term he trots out. Whatever the explanation, it’s going to leave you frustrated.

The Hawkeyes were ninth heading into last weekend and beat a far-from-spectacular Indiana by eight points in Bloomington. And then they rose four spots.

Part of that can be explained by the fact that three teams above Iowa lost -- No. 2 LSU (which slipped to ninth), No. 7 Michigan State (to 13th) and No. 8 TCU (to 15th). So the Hawkeyes were destined to move up. But they also moved past Baylor, a fellow undefeated team that beat Kansas State (of similar quality to Indiana) on the road by a nearly identical margin.

I can scoff at this from a pure quality standpoint -- Baylor ranks 10th in the F/+ rankings and eighth in the Massey Composite, while Iowa ranks 17th and ninth. But there are likely plenty of sound reasons (and some more unsound ones). Kansas State really isn’t too good, and while the Wildcats nearly beat TCU and Oklahoma State, they’ve had some duds. Baylor’s inability to put the Wildcats away stoked fears about the Bears’ ability to keep winning now that a freshman quarterback is leading the show. (That freshman quarterback completed 23 of 33 passes for 419 yards and no picks against KSU, but I digress.)

Plus, Iowa likely got a boost from the fact that Wisconsin is now a top-25 team. The Badgers are 25th in the new rankings, and Iowa’s road wins over UW (by a little) and Northwestern (by a lot) are their best calling cards.

Long’s explanation for Iowa’s rise: “I think we recognize that they are consistent on both sides of the ball. They’re not a flashy team, but they are consistent.” OK, great. Good to know.

He also delved into “body clocks” when discussing Stanford’s No. 7 ranking -- which placed the Cardinal ahead of unbeaten Oklahoma State -- by discussing the role that a super-early kickoff time may have played in Stanford’s Week 1 loss to Northwestern. He could have just said, “They’ve been awesome ever since,” but didn’t.

Safe to say, any power-conference team that finishes undefeated -- and we’re down to five -- is in the Playoff.

And while the Big 12 continues to see its ratings tamped down, the conference’s big games are only revving up. If Iowa got a boost for having wins over two top-25 teams, it bears mentioning that Baylor has three top-15 opponents remaining on the slate. So does No. 12 Oklahoma. No. 8 OSU has two and just beat TCU. The late round robin will drastically improve Big 12 strengths of schedule, and teams losing will create drastic shifts over these four coming weeks.

Last year, after 10 weeks, the top five were Mississippi State (which finished seventh), Florida State (third), Auburn (19th), Oregon (second) and Alabama (first). Three remained in the top five, but one fell a little, and another fell a lot. Ohio State was 14th and had time to move to fourth, and Baylor was 12th and finished fifth. Of the final top 10, only six held such a status after 10 weeks.

So further change is all but assured.

Here’s your weekly look at S&P+ win probabilities, excluding conference championship games. For clarity, I’ve sorted teams into three pools: Unbeaten teams, one-loss teams and two-loss teams.

So what do the probabilities tell us at the moment?

As good as the Bears have been, their upcoming slate is about as hard as anyone’s. By S&P+ rankings, they face No. 5 Oklahoma at home on Saturday, then visit No. 16 Oklahoma State, then visit No. 13 TCU. From an odds perspective, that’s three straight tossups.

Yes, we all have memories of what Baylor has done to Oklahoma recently -- 41-12 in 2013, 48-14 in 2014 -- but numbers aren’t going to care. On paper, this is a tight matchup, and even if Baylor trounces the Sooners again, there are two more battles on deck. If Baylor’s still undefeated in three weeks, its ranking will no longer be an issue.

Alabama is projected to beat Mississippi State by a projected score of 30-23, with 65 percent win probability. That’s a reminder both that a) the Tide are semi-comfortable here, and b) they’re not completely comfortable. MSU has played at the 83rd percentile or higher for four games in a row after a shaky first few weeks of the season. Alabama is still better, but the Bulldogs are peaking and could give the Tide a much stiffer battle (with a one-in-three shot of winning) than some might think.

No matter what you think of the Hawkeyes, they’ve survived three road tests in the last month or so, and the schedule is clearing up a bit. Week 11 opponent Minnesota seems to be improving, and Week 13 road opponent Nebraska is coming off of its best performance of the season.

But the Hawkeyes have a 42 percent chance of finishing 12-0 and a 44 percent chance of finishing 11-1. Even an 11-1 Hawkeye team would be an interesting Playoff candidate if it then beats an Ohio State in the Big Ten Championship. Obviously the S&P+ ratings don’t love the Hawkeyes, but with the remaining slate, that might not matter.

Yes, this is college football, and we could be due some incredible upset. For all of the perceived craziness this year, we actually haven’t had much. But it would take something incredible for Clemson not to be 12-0 in three weeks.