The path to the playoff for ‘hard to kill’ Georgia football after the first CFP rankings
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The initial College Football Playoff rankings are out, and Georgia football is pretty much in a similar situation where it was a year ago.
Sitting at 7-1 and going to Mississippi for a road trip with four games to go.
The Bulldogs were boatraced by Ole Miss last season after the first rankings reveal and bounced back to close out the regular season with three wins in a row, and then with their playoff spot all but secured, won the SEC championship.
So if Georgia, ranked No. 5 by the CFP in its first reveal on Tuesday night, Nov. 4, can get by Mississippi State Saturday on the road — no sure thing with this team — it seems to be in good shape for the playoff if it can beat either No. 11 Texas or No. 17 Georgia Tech.
Georgia needed overtime to beat both those teams in back-to-back weeks last year, going eight overtimes against the Yellow Jackets to end the regular season and then going past regulation in the SEC title game against the Longhorns.
None of the three remaining games against Power Four teams are to be taken for granted.
Georgia got all it could handle with two programs that now have interim coaches.
Auburn led Georgia 10-0 near the end of the first half before the Bulldogs got a forced fumble near the goal line and went on to win 20-10. Last Saturday, Georgia rallied again to beat Florida 24-20, getting the go-ahead touchdown with 4:36 to go.
It trailed Ole Miss 35-26 but clamped down in the fourth quarter and won 43-35.
“The one thing we are, we’re hard to kill,” coach Kirby Smart said after the Ole Miss game. “We won’t go away.”
Georgia has a 25% chance to win out and a 30% chance to lose at least twice, according to ESPN’s Bill Connelly, who noted all three P4 games for the Bulldogs left are projected one-score games.
The SEC has four of the top six teams in the rankings and six of the top 12: No. 3 Texas A&M, No. 4 Alabama, No. 5 Georgia and No. 6 Ole Miss They are behind No. 1 Ohio State and No. 2 Indiana from the Big Ten. SEC teams Texas and Oklahoma rank No. 11 and No. 12, respectively.
The CFP made changes in the offseason to add greater weight to games against stronger opponents and added record strength to assess how a team did against the schedule in hopes of rewarding teams that beat high-quality opponents and minimizing losses to such a team.
Georgia ranks No. 8 in schedule strength in the Sagarin Ratings.
Alabama is No. 4, Texas A&M is No. 11, Ohio State is No. 22, Ole Miss is No. 23, Oregon is No. 44 and Indiana is No. 50.
CFP selection committee chair Mack Rhodes said on a media teleconference that the CFP’s schedule strength formula put more weight on stronger teams on a schedule.
“We have a variety of tools at our disposal,” Rhodes said on ESPN. “Not one is weighed more than another. We’re looking at head, we’re looking at common opponent, we’re looking at schedule strength, we’re looking at record strength. We’re looking at all the analytics. And so we truly try to look at each team on its own and its body of work.”
Georgia’s body of work will have another data point after its game in Starkville Saturday.
This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Georgia has CFP ranking. Now it wants to avoid speed bump at Starkville
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