The CFP committee must account for conference champions — but what if it didn’t?

The Oregon Ducks remained No. 1 in the third set of College Football Playoff rankings, which were released on Tuesday night. The Ducks, who currently sit at 11-0 overall and 8-0 in Big Ten play, were followed by Ohio State at No. 2 and Texas at No. 3. Penn State and Indiana round out the top five teams.

But the real shakeup this week came when the selection committee ranked Boise State No. 12, two spots ahead of BYU (14) and four spots ahead of Colorado (16). After the Cougars suffered their first loss of the season this past weekend, a 17-13 defeat to Kansas (4-6), it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the committee was unkind to BYU. However, with Boise State now ranked ahead of BYU, we must accept a scenario where a G5 champion might be one of the four highest-ranked conference champions in the sport.

[Related: College Football Playoff rankings: Oregon remains on top; BYU falls eight spots]

Add to that the fact that Army could move to 10-0 with a win against No. 6-ranked Notre Dame this weekend. If that were to happen, the Black Knights – ranked No. 19 – could potentially leap into the top 10 of the rankings next week and move the presumptive American Athletic Conference champion ahead of at least one presumptive Power 4 champion.

With five SEC teams, four Big Ten teams and one ACC team ranked ahead of any Big 12 teams, more and more people are going to become aware that the selection committee is obliged to give the four highest-ranked conference champions — not just Power 4 champions — one of the coveted top seeds that is rewarded with a first-round bye before participating in the playoff.

The criteria for ranking and selecting teams for the CFP is clear for the committee: It must account for conference champions. But what if it didn’t?

That is going to be the next large hurdle for the sport in this evolving postseason format.

Conference championships are a relatively new idea. The SEC created its league title game in 1992. Every other iteration of a conference title game has been reinvented or established for the first time over the last 26 years — from the MAC (1997) to the Sun Belt (2018) — and the only team that has benefited from not playing for a conference title is Notre Dame, which feels like the only program getting to take advantage of sitting out the conference title weekend.

Five conference title games — including three in Power conferences — were (re)created in six years (2011-2017) to help persuade national title selectors to include one or both of a league’s conference title contenders as worthy entrants to play for the national championship. It has worked out for the SEC, which has seen its conference championship become the national title game twice since 2017.

This year, as many as three teams might feel they were unfairly left out of the 12-team field because someone in a league not as tough as the SEC happened to win theirs — like an American or Mountain West program.

Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin, whose team is in contention for selection in the 12-team field, pointed out that the risk isn’t worth the reward anymore.

“I’ve talked to other coaches, so I’ll just kind of give you the feeling from some other coaches, that they don’t want to be in it,” Kiffin said of conference championship games. “You know, the reward to get a bye versus the risk to get knocked out completely. I mean … that’s a really big risk.

“There’s a cost and benefit to everything. There are great benefits to this playoff system and so many people being excited and fans and programs and more games, and then there’s cost, too. The conference championships don’t mean as much.”

And finally, there is Indiana, sitting at 10-0 with an opportunity to really make this committee look foolish, as Ohio State (2), Texas (3) and Penn State (4) all have losses this season.

You never quite know what you’re going to get with this committee, and that is why we must account for their strange logic of ranking 10-0 Indiana behind 9-1 Penn State. I wouldn’t put it past them to include two G5 champions at the expense of better teams in the SEC or Big Ten. 

The suits have the power to make things really interesting. After all, they left out 13-0 Florida State just last year, and, fair or not, that program has yet to recover.

RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast “The Number One College Football Show.” Follow him on Twitter at @RJ_Young and subscribe to “The RJ Young Show” on YouTube.

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