CFP rankings 2026: Alabama ranks 5th in first playoff rankings

Well, we now have our first set of CFP rankings for the 2026 season. While these rankings don’t technically matter too much this early in the season, it also gives us some insights on how the nebulous Committee is feeling about things this year and where some of these teams stand in the pole positions for a shot at the playoffs, particularly among all of the 2-loss teams.

Without further opining, here are the initial rankings:

1. Miami
2. Georgia
3. Utah
4. Indiana
5. Alabama
6. Kentucky
7. Texas
8. UCLA
9. BYU
10. Ole Miss
11. Notre Dame
12. Ohio State
13. Tennessee
14. LSU
15. Texas Tech
16. Wake Forest
17. Houston
18. Missouri
19. Iowa
20. USC
21. South Carolina
22. Arizona
23. Oregon
24. Florida
25. Boise State

Well then, that ought to ruffle some feathers.

Miami at #1 was a no brainer decision, but after that, things get funky. Georgia makes sense at #2, but they also have one of the worst losses in the top ten with their loss to Auburn. Meanwhile, Utah is undefeated and clearly penalized a bit for how week the Big 12 is. Interestingly, UCLA is ALSO undefeated in the Big 10, with an admittedly weak schedule, and are ranked all the way down at 8th – so it seems there’s still some distrust of the Bruins solely for being new to being successful this year.

The next two spots, belonging to Indiana and Alabama, are likely going to be the most talked about. The Hoosiers have barely survived a bunch of games with a weak schedule this year, and lost their only real game to Ohio State. Meanwhile, the Buckeyes were dropped all the way to 12th for their losses to Texas and USC – both ranked squads. There may be some penalizing going on for the Bucks losing QB Julian Sayin to injury.

Then there’s Alabama…. The Tide is the highest ranked 2-loss team, and even ahead of multiple 1-loss squads like Kentucky and Notre Dame. More interestingly is the massive discrepency between Alabama and Tennessee, despite the two teams having the same record and Tennessee beating Alabama soundly.

Chairman Hunter Yuracheck mentioned that they viewed teams in “pods”, so Alabama and Kentucky were compared together and the Tide’s head-to-head win over the Wildcats. But Tennessee’s lack of “signature wins” outside of the Alabama game knocked them down a pod, so they weren’t directly compared to Alabama.

And for “signature wins” Yuracheck pointed out that Alabama’s big wins over Kentucky and South Carolina made an impression, and he repeatedly emphasized that Alabama’s dominance over Mississippi State while they still had Kamario Taylor and were undefeated was something that really impressed them.

It also seems like both Alabama and Georgia got a little bit of mutual leeway for their losses the week after playing each other, though that wasn’t explicitly said.

For Alabama, this is way better than we could have hoped, and it seems like Kentucky is carrying a lot of water for us. The Tide has a straight shot to the playoffs if they can win out from here. And a tight loss to LSU before winning out the rest of the way would still have a good shot at the Tide getting in, especially with many of the other teams currently in the top 12 likely to lose a game as well. As far as odds go, the Fanduel sportsbook now has Alabama at the team with the 4th best odds to make the playoffs at -360, behind only Miami, UGA, and Indiana.

At the current placement, Alabama would be playing the 12-seed Boise State as the highest ranked G6 team.

So tonight went better than we honestly could have hoped for. Now we just need the Tide to keep delivering for 4 more games.

Roll Tide!