Alabama Football: First Top 8 College Football Playoff Rankings

Before we know where Alabama football will rank in the first official College Football Playoff rankings on Tuesday, the Bama Hammer staff decided to release our own Playoff rankings.

When the first Playoff rankings are released on Tuesday, you can expect that they will be a direct reflection of the craziness that has been the 2020 college football season. Alabama football will certainly be included in the top four, but the rest of the field is somewhat of a mystery. Directly paralleling the strangeness that has been 2020, you should not be surprised to see two independents and one Group of Five in the Top 10 and maybe even the Top eight when the first playoff rankings are released.

Will it end up this way? Will 2020 give us the first Group of Five, team to make the Playoff? I will say this. Don’t rule anything out in 2020. This is definitely the year the Group of five has had the best chance to make the field. If it doesn’t happen this year, it will never happen with the current format.

A little background before we begin. Much like with our weekly SEC Power Rankings, we polled the Bama Hammer staff for their Top eight Playoff teams. We then assigned points to each team in reverse order of rankings (8 points for a 1st place vote, 7 points for a 2nd, and so on). Six staffers responded with their votes so the most points a team can receive is 48. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that only ten teams received any points.

With that, let’s get straight into the rankings. (Note all schedule information and stats comes from ESPN)