Where will the Texas A&M football team land in the first CFP rankings?

The Texas A&M football team’s chances to make the College Football Playoff are extremely slim, as the Aggies already have a pair of losses on the year. That said, they’re not entirely down and out — a two-loss team has never made the College Football Playoff before but the Aggies have as good of an argument as anyone in the past.

This creates an interesting discussion ahead of the first College Football Playoff rankings of the season on Tuesday.

The committee has made interesting decisions in the past, so the Aggies’ placement could differ drastically from their positioning in the most recent AP Poll. As things stand, A&M is the 13th-ranked team in the country according to AP voters.

The Texas A&M football team has arguably the best win in college football this season

I won’t lie to you and say that I know exactly what the College Football Playoff committee looks for when they’re ranking these teams, but patterns have been clear over the years.

The committee values quality wins and there may not be a team in the country with a higher quality win than Texas A&M. The Aggies took down an Alabama team that was ranked No. 1 in the AP Poll and continues to look extremely impressive.

For this reason, I think the Aggies’ ceiling is extremely high in these rankings. But just as high as their ceiling goes, their floor drops.

A&M’s two losses were extremely ugly. I’ll sit here and argue with you all day about the drastic differences between today’s team and last month’s team, but at the end of the day, the 2021 Texas A&M football team lost two games. Both of these losses were against teams that are now unranked.

It’s reasons like this that some are predicting the Aggies to land lower in the College Football Playoff committee’s eyes than they are in the AP Poll. Take NCAA.com as an example, where A&M lands at the 15th spot below both Auburn and Ole Miss, the other ranked two-loss SEC teams.

In this figure, the committee is projected to not only value strong wins, but hold a heavy weight on ugly losses. In that sense, they would not be wrong to drop Jimbo Fisher’s team.

But here’s the question that I will pose.

Do they want the team with the best resume or the team that they believe will be the most competitive in the College Football Playoff? No matter how the season ends, the Aggies won’t have one of the four most impressive resumes in the game. That said, their win over ‘Bama proves that they can hang with and even defeat anybody in the country.

Right now, it’s a waiting game. Realistically, A&M could be anywhere from the top ten to the lower teens.