College football rankings: Here’s your Playoff, if the season ended after Week 7

The college football season does not end after six weeks. That’s a good thing, because if the college football season ended after six weeks, a couple of undefeated teams with great Playoff cases would be left out in the cold.

Fortunately, we’ve still got about two months for everything to sort itself out. Ohio State and Michigan will play each other with the Big Ten East (and a highly likely Playoff bid) on the line, while Alabama will have any number of potential play-in games in the SEC. The rest of the country’s contenders still have ample time to play catch up if someone missteps.

But if none of that were true, here’s how we’d pick the four-team field right now:

On aggregate, we’ve come up with, in order: Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson, and Michigan.

Talking through all this are Ryan Nanni and Matt Brown:

Fear not, Washington and Texas A&M fans. Ohio State or Michigan should vanquish the other, and A&M gets its crack at Bama off a bye in two weekends. If the Huskies keep devouring the Pac-12 and don’t lose, there will probably be plenty of room for them by the end of the year. There’s still a non-zero chance for one-loss teams like Louisville, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, and, hey: Nebraska and Boise State are both unbeaten.

This week brings the end of serious Playoff consideration for Houston, which took a body blow against Navy and now needs so, so many things to break right to have a top-four chance.

Oh hey, the top 25s are finally out for this week. Tennessee stayed put in the AP Poll despite losing (this is defensible), and LSU and Florida both moved up in the Coaches Poll despite not winning (this isn’t). In brighter news, WMU is ranked for the first time ever.

Michigan State might become the first team to fall from the Playoff to missing bowl season. Bill C looks at this mess.

Jim Harbaugh says he’s going to the Ann Arbor Ruth’s Chris to take advantage of the massive discount his team’s beatdown of Rutgers earned.

Tennessee dismissed the player who was carted off on Saturday, citing an unrelated rules violation.

Charlie Strong said a little thing about Baylor and TCU that he’ll be hearing about later in the season.

BYU’s victory celebration included Ty Detmer doing the Macarena. Makes sense.

Here’s how loud it was a mile from Kyle Field when Texas A&M beat Tennessee.

Miami boots a four-star freshman receiver, and this is when certain outlets that cover Georgia football would try to tell you that Mark Richt has lost control of the program.

Arkansas’ QB put up 400 yards despite facing pressure on a pretty staggering amount of dropbacks.

The NCAA’s proposing a tune-up to the satellite camps schedule.

Baylor coaches all bombed out one of Art Briles’ hashtags on Twitter, in protest of a dispute with the school over a dismissed player. Lot going on here.

Lovie Smith’s reaction when asked if he’s being too easy on his Illinois players is pretty good.

The Shutdown Fullcast Week 6 recap, probably a third of which is laughing at Rutgers and Notre Dame.

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