CFP keeps pre-championship weekend rankings show on ESPN despite mounting criticism
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The College Football Playoff selection committee isn’t done boxing itself into corners just yet.
According to a CFP release confirming this year’s rankings schedule, the committee will unveil its penultimate top 25 on Tuesday, Dec. 1 — four days before conference championship weekend and a full six days before the final rankings and bracket reveal on Sunday, Dec. 6.
ESPN/CFP still doing a rankings release ahead of conference championship games. That’s what has boxed the committee into tough spots over the years, especially last year. Because not everyone plays between that + final rankings.
I would have cut that one if it were me. https://t.co/nG85kazkJI
— Nicole Auerbach (@NicoleAuerbach) August 6, 2026
Last December, many will recall a critical flip-flop by the committee between the final ranking show on ESPN before the conference championships and the formal selection of the 12-team playoff field the Sunday after those games were played. Despite neither team competing in a conference title game, Miami mysteriously jumped Notre Dame to secure what was, in practice, the final at-large spot in the CFP.
In the wake of that fallout, The Athletic’s Ralph D. Russo and Chris Vannini reported the committee was weighing several fixes when it convened in Dallas this past April. Beyond scrapping the pre-championship-weekend rankings show, the outlet detailed two other changes under consideration: pushing the first rankings release later into the season to avoid setting misleading early baselines, and reducing or eliminating ESPN’s weekly interview with the committee chairman, whose comments have repeatedly been used against the committee once its logic shifted later in the season.
That proposed remedy evidently didn’t survive contact with ESPN’s rights deal. This year’s calendar still slots a Tuesday broadcast — 7 to 7:30 p.m. ET on Dec. 1 — on the wrong side of championship Saturday, and the season’s first ranking still arrives Nov. 3, barely two months into the schedule.
That show has been a source of consternation among football fans, and even ESPN’s own college football analysts, for years. Awful Announcing’s Matt Yoder made the case last November that the weekly rankings serve no real purpose beyond giving ESPN an hour of debate-driven programming, pointing to committee chair Hunter Yurachek’s contradictory use of head-to-head results and strength-of-schedule arguments from week to week. Even ESPN’s own talent has piled on, as Kirk Herbstreit argued the sport should scrap the Tuesday night show, given that rankings released before conference title games and full head-to-head data are in have to be revised anyway once the season actually finishes.
“It’s really not supposed to be the real rankings until the season is over,” Kirk Herbstreit said during a College GameDay appearance, arguing that the sport should scrap the Tuesday night show, given that rankings released before conference title games and full head-to-head data are in have to be revised anyway once the season actually finishes.
ESPN, for its part, pays for five midweek shows as part of its CFP media rights deal, and the audience for them — 1.7 million viewers weekly last season, per The Athletic’s reporting — gives the network little reason to give up programming it has already bought. Between a chairman who sees no need to change course and a broadcast partner with no financial incentive to ask him to, the committee is stuck publishing rankings it already knows are provisional, headed toward the same reckoning once championship weekend renders half its logic moot.
The post CFP keeps pre-championship weekend rankings show on ESPN despite mounting criticism appeared first on Awful Announcing.
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