Ohio State to beat Michigan State: Bill Livingston

So the committee’s weekly rankings, which will be released Tuesday night, are much more anticipated than in recent weeks.

Their playoff hopes were emboldened Tuesday when the Buckeyes moved into second in the College Football Playoff rankings behind Alabama, with MI and Clemson still in the top four after losing for the first time this season. Michigan’s loss at Iowa was a bad one since the Wolverines haven’t played as tough a schedule as the Buckeyes.

Besides past year, the Spartans won 34-24 in the 2013 Big Ten championship game to keep the previously undefeated Buckeyes out of the College Football Playoff. But even though the Cardinals have one less loss than Penn State, they only have the one good win over FSU, no other significant victories, and they probably will not win their own conference, the ACC, because Clemson holds the tiebreaker to get to the title game.

“That would be the most hard question the committee has to deal with”, Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl president and CEO Gary Stokan said this week.

Nothing is a given, but under that circumstance, a two-loss team would be the conference champion and the one-loss Buckeyes, a team that would remain No. 2 in the CFP rankings and ahead of the Nittany Lions and Badgers, wouldn’t be crowned conference champion. They have three of the four individual leaders in the conference in service aces per set, redshirt junior Brooke Kranda, junior Rachel Minarick and junior Holly Toliver. But there’s no rule setting such a limit.

It presents a conundrum for the selection committee.

Three of the top four teams lost last week, and two of them stayed in the top four. If they win out (which would include beating MI and effectively knocking out Jim Harbaugh and company) and don’t play in the Big Ten title game, I still think they’ll make it as one of few remaining one-loss teams.

And while the league is now in a great position, it’s incredibly unclear how this will shake out.

Meyer said those receivers, mainly Noah Brown, Parris Campbell and Terry McLaurin, had their best games the past two weeks, even though the box scores might not directly reflect it.

But so was the idea of Iowa (6-4, 4-3), a 24-point underdog, finding itself in time to stun Big Blue. It presumably won’t turn out that way because those teams will sort things out between them next week.

If not the Rose Bowl, their most likely bowl destinations seem to be the Orange or Cotton in the New Year’s Six or the Outback.

Ohio State was fifth in the playoff committee’s rankings last week, but Nos. No. 15 Auburn in the Sugar and No. 10 Colorado vs.

Bridges, a 6-foot-7 freshman, put on quite a show that the fans loved at the Breslin Center, including former Michigan State great and Hall of Famer Magic Johnson. In 1998, Ohio State was No. 1 in the nation when it lost at home in November to an unranked Michigan State team.

The biggest developing mess is the Big Ten. The win broke an 0-7 SU and 1-6 ATS losing streak to bring the team’s record to 3-7 SU and 4-6 ATS on the year. Two of those losses have come against the Spartans, with both ruining Ohio State’s national title hopes.