ALDLAND Delivers the Official 2025 College Football Playoff Rankings

Unlike the College Football Playoff Committee with respect to the selection of the College Football Playoff field and rankings, I am willing to declare both that I am biased and the precise nature of my bias. In that regard, I am biased, and my bias is that I am opposed to the College Football Playoff Committee itself. To be sure, that bias is not one recently or hastily adopted but, instead, long-held and deep-seated. My public writings dating back to 2013 confirm the fortitude of my bias.

With that noble acknowledgement decreed, I present ALDLAND’s final 2025 College Football Playoff rankings for purposes of playoff seeding:

  1. Indiana
  2. Georgia
  3. Ohio State
  4. Texas Tech
  5. Vanderbilt
  6. Texas A&M
  7. Ole Miss
  8. Oregon
  9. Oklahoma
  10. Miami
  11. Notre Dame
  12. Texas

The reasoning behind these rankings ought to be fairly obvious, but I will add a note regarding the Group of Five’s total exclusion: I acknowledge that the prior exclusion of arguably worthy representatives of the Group of Five from the formal contesting of the national championship under previous regimes was a significant driver of the change to the expanded-playoff format, that did not and does not now mean that there is at least one such worthy representative every year, and there is no such worthy representative this year.

C-3P-No: Chris Paul, David Stern, the fourth wall, and McCulloch v. Maryland

http://twitter.com/#!/CP3/status/144962250854248448

In a matter of hours last night, the following events occurred, in sequence, beginning around 8:00 Eastern:

  1. The Hornets, Rockets, and Lakers agree to a trade that would send Chris Paul (aka CP3) to Los Angeles, Lamar Odom, Louis Scola, Kevin Martin, and Goran Dragic to New Orleans, and Pau Gasol to Houston. Or something like that.
  2. The NBA and the re-formed players’ association finalize the new collective bargaining agreement, officially ending the lockout.
  3. David Stern, on behalf of the league, nullified the trade for “basketball reasons.”

In trying to understand what happened here, citing “basketball reasons” is pretty unhelpful. I suppose it’s preferable to “bocce ball reasons,” but still. Stern ostensibly was acting on behalf of small-market owners, including Cleveland’s Dan Gilbert, who objected to the deal. What he won’t tell you in this conversation, but everyone else knows, is that the league owns the Hornets. Keep reading…