UCLA at USC, Notre Dame at Stanford, more

Wave the worry warts away.

But what’s confusing here, and probably frustrating to many Spartans fans, is why the committee chose to leave this team out of the rankings in the first place. The top four teams qualify for the two semifinal games, which will be held at the Orange and Cotton bowls on December 31. Notre Dame dropped out of the top four to No. 6. “His focus is here at Notre Dame, and he wants to be here”. Notre Dame hover between number three and number 6 on the polls/computer ratings, and have a stronger computer ranking than Iowa, and the same goes for Oklahoma and MI State. It’s hottest team might be #10 MI, a two-loss team and the last of the conference’s four teams.

The Sooners won’t get tangled in that mess.

And there’s no great opportunity for Notre Dame to narrow the gap. Their season will end next week after playing IL. OU is in Stillwater for Bedlam against the 11th-ranked Cowboys.

Head coach Brian Kelly of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish exits the field after the game … While we can pretty safely label Ohio State as overrated prior to this week, Sparty still owns the best trio of wins in the nation after beating the Buckeyes in Columbus. After the apparent turmoil following its loss to MI State last weekend, Ohio State will enter this Saturday’s game as the underdog – something nobody saw coming.

MI State plays Penn State on Saturday and Iowa is at Nebraska on Friday.

The Alabama Crimson Tide is the only SEC team represented in the top 10.

The reason that’s more important than TCU’s 16-point fourth quarter and the near-miss of an upset – or the fact the Horned Frogs played without all-star quarterback Trevone Boykin and receiver Josh Doctson – is that Mayfield didn’t play in the second half. Notre Dame travels to Palo Alto and face No. 9 Stanford, a win is a must, but the Irish need Oklahoma to lose at Oklahoma State to feel truly secure that they’ve done enough to lock up a spot while they sit idle during championship week. “They’ve done that over the last two weeks”.

The CFP committee took notice of that performance, chairman Jeff Long said.

Notre Dame’s sloppy play the past two weeks has caught up to the Irish.

The committee has made it clear that it simply does not respect North Carolina.

And falling fast for the Sooners. If nothing else, it seemed to show the committee really wasn’t paying much attention to where the teams had been ranked the previous week.

Stanford would prefer three-loss UCLA defeat four-loss USC on Saturday because the Bruins are ranked No. 22 this week. “And, again, like past year (with Ohio State’s Cardale Jones) it speaks to the strength of that overall team that they could continue to perform at a high level with a third-string quarterback”.

While we’re on the subject of the Big 12; is it a bit perplexing to anyone else that the Sooners moved all the way up to No. 3? Any more chaos – weirdness in the Big Ten, for example, an Alabama loss, Clemson getting upset, whatever – would just be icing.

Heck, at No. 3, it’s not insane to hope for elevation to the No. 1 seed.

Clemson is “solidly” ahead of Alabama. But nutty things happen this time of year. Baylor, 14. Oklahoma State and 25.