North Carolina Tar Heels: #23 in the CFP Rankings
The North Carolina Tar Heels joined the rankings for the College Football Playoff this week. The Heels, who ranked in the Coaches and AP Polls last week and this week, were left out of the initial rankings for the Playoff.
They now sit at Number 23 in the lineup, just inside the list but near the spots they would need for inclusion into the Playoff. Now, it is quite reasonable to conclude that the College Playoff Rankings are superfluous right now. Following horse race changes in the rankings themselves is useless because only the final rankings matter.
Last year we saw that the rankings for the final week of the season weren’t particularly predictive of the final slate with major movement going on. So no one should dread or be particularly optimistic about the Tar Heels being so far from the top of the list.
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The only real lesson that one can glean from the current rankings is that the Committee still does not believe that the Tar Heels are worthy of higher consideration. The reason for that is that they continue to rank the Florida State Seminoles higher than the Heels.
The Tar Heels at least have a chance of winning the ACC and beating Clemson if they can get to Charlotte. The Seminoles have already lost to Clemson and cannot go to the ACC Championship game since Clemson clinched the Atlantic. Which means the Committee feels that the Heels are six spots lower than a team that cannot make the playoff.
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The reason that North Carolina is ranked so low at this point is the schedule. The lone loss to South Carolina did not turn out to be a good loss. The out of conference wins over two FCS schools and Illinois did little for the profile either. The Tar Heels can’t really do anything about those facts now, their lone pathway is to win the Coastal (without losing) and beat Clemson. Even then, the Committee might prefer Notre Dame or Stanford.
The Tar Heels play Miami on Saturday.