USA Today Sports
After the latest rankings were released on Tuesday night, the chairman of the College Football Playoff Committee, Kirby Hocutt, did about a 20-minute teleconference with reporters. The Courier-Journal’s Steve Jones asked a couple of questions specifically about Louisville. This is what Hocutt said about the Cards and why they were 5th.
I was wondering as far as the teams, I guess 3 through 5 there, Michigan, Clemson, Louisville, Louisville’s loss obviously was to Clemson, but I guess irrespective of the fact that it was Clemson itself, but just that they were a very highly ranked playoff contender themselves, versus the other two were to unranked teams that Michigan and Clemson lost to, how do you evaluate the, quote-unquote, quality of a loss or a good loss, or if that was as much of a priority?
KIRBY HOCUTT: Well, we evaluate the complete résumé. You know, in Michigan’s case, although they lost to an unranked team, they do have three wins against current CFP top-10 teams. As you look at Clemson, they have three wins against current CFP top-25 teams as well as the head-to-head over Louisville. Louisville, very talented team, only one win over a CFP top-25 team, that being a very talented Florida State team.
We talked in depth about those quality wins. We talked in depth about those losses and all the other facets that make up each of those teams’ résumés. We’ll continue to evaluate all of these teams each week based upon their full body of work.
The other follow-up I had is obviously Louisville has Lamar Jackson, who’s kind of a unanimous Heisman favorite at this point. Does something like that ever come into play, well, this team has the best player so surely that makes them one of the best teams, or we should have them in our playoff because they have such an elite player? Does anything on that level come into the discussion?
KIRBY HOCUTT: No, it doesn’t. We talk about teams, performances of the team. We don’t talk about individual players in that regard. You know, as we talk about the offensive production for a particular team, a particular individual may be mentioned, but not as it having impact on our rankings.
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