College football playoff poll projections: No Group of Five expected to be ranked

The latest College Football Poll will be released tomorrow at its usual Tuesday evening slot and so far there have been zero teams ranked from outside of the power conferences; the lone exception being East Carolina back in the first week of the poll. Expect for Boise State, Marshall and Colorado State to still be on the outside looking when the latest version of the poll is out.

Jerry Palm of CBSSports.com is projecting that once again that the Group of Five will be left out of the poll. The top of the poll is likely to have the same characters with Alabama, Oregon, Florida State and Mississippi State expected to hold onto their top spots for the second straight week.

Those are not the rankings we care about; the Group of Five want to know who is the best amongst that group so that there is some sort of pecking order. We do know that Marshall was considered close to the rankings with Boise State, Memphis and Colorado State being discusses. Who knows what being close really means, maybe they just mentioned Marshall twice and the other teams once and called it a day. Who knows?

In Palm's projections, he has an 8-4 Utah team ranked at No. 24, and this Ute team was blown out to Arizona, at home, 42-10. The week prior Utah was No. 17 and LSU is expected to go from not ranked to No. 23 after winning the bye week and they also have four loses. Perhaps they are getting the bump after its last loss which came by the hands of the suddenly hot Arkansas. If both Utah and LSU are ranked, and again with four loses each, it is clear the committee is valuing who one has played over actually beating teams on the schedule.

It used to be that winning games was very important, but now it is just who a team plays and the result, on some level, does not seem to matter.