On Tuesday evening, the College Football Playoff selection committee will release its first rankings of the 2026 season. Granted, non-binding rankings made with several weeks of data points still to come for the benefit of television ratings don't mean much in the grand scheme of things. But hey, at least they'll take the place of the AP poll in our national discourse — which, based on the latest top 25 rankings coming out of Week 9, can't come soon enough.

It was one thing when chaos reigned around the country and top-10 teams were falling seemingly every other hour; you try to create a coherent ballot under those circumstances. But this past Saturday was shockingly calm, with only Ohio State — down to its backup quarterback already — going down. And yet, AP voters still managed to produce some truly baffling results. Let's get into it.

How on Earth did Notre Dame stay ahead of UCLA?

Notre Dame eventually cruised to a 22-point win over Navy on Saturday, but that required a 21-0 run in the second half, another less-than-authoritative performance from a team that still doesn't have a win to write home about this season. (The rest of the list: Wisconsin, Rice, Michigan State, Purdue, UNC and Stanford.) And yet, they remain the second-highest ranked one-loss team in the country, No. 4 in the latest poll behind only Miami, Georgia and Utah.

What exactly have the Irish done to earn that sort of benefit of the doubt? Why do they deserve to be ahead of a team like UCLA, which has similar strength-of-schedule concerns but at least won its road trip to Oregon and hasn't lost yet? If we're all just assuming that Notre Dame is this good, fair enough, and they'll certainly have a chance to prove themselves with Miami coming to town next Saturday. But that's not a standard to which we hold any other program.

Top-10 Texas is a dramatic overreaction

Two weeks ago, Texas was about to tumble all the way out of the top 25 on the heels of consecutive losses to Oklahoma and Florida. Now, they're somehow back up to 10. Plenty of chaos has happened in the meantime, which certainly helps, but home wins over Ole Miss (impressive!) and the husk of Mississippi State (less so!) wouldn't seem to warrant that sort of double-digit swing.

Either we believe in the Horns or we don't. It's not like those losses look much better now than they did at the time; if anything, the Oklahoma loss looks even worse after the Sooners just got blasted at home by South Carolina. If you thought Texas was truly a top-10 team, why drop them so low? And if you thought they weren't, or if you thought two very bad losses were worthy of that sort of punishment, why would they be back in your good graces already?

Are we sure that Alabama deserves to be ranked six spots ahead of LSU?

We'll get our answer here in just a few days, as Alabama heads to Baton Rouge as part of a massive showdown Saturday in the SEC. And head-to-head games likely play a role here; voters don't want to put LSU ahead of a team they already lost to like Ole Miss.

But are we really sure there should be that big of a gap between these two one-loss teams? LSU's losses both came on the road to current top-15 teams by one score (or, in the case of the Kentucky game, one point). Alabama's losses came at home to Georgia by a field goal and on the road to Tennessee by 16 in a game that didn't even feel that close. And the Tigers have been far more authoritative in their wins than Kalen DeBoer's team has; they pantsed the same Texas A&M team that just pushed Bama into the fourth quarter last weekend.

It's about time AP voters finally showed Wake Forest some respect

I get it, "ain't played nobody" concerns apply to a Wake team that's played one ranked opponent all year (Miami; they lost 33-20 back in September). But these Demon Deacons are absolutely pasting the teams they do play, thanks to Gio Lopez and one of the most efficient offenses in the country. Surely, in a year in which everybody else is tripping over themselves on a weekly basis, that should count for something?

I'm not advocating for Wake to find itself in the top five. But they've been stuck on the fringe of the top 15 for a while now, which strikes me as disrespectful — and slow to adjust to a team that's just plain good. If they beat SMU in Dallas in two weeks, I expect a course-correction.

Beating a hobbled Ohio State shouldn't have USC jumping into the top 20

USC fell all the way out of the top 25 with an ugly loss to Wisconsin last weekend. Now they've jumped 13 whole spots all the way to 18 — all thanks to beating an Ohio State team that was rolling out a three-star true freshman in his first career start.

Does that seem like an overreaction to anyone else? It's not even like the Trojans were particularly dominant; outside of two long catch-and-runs from Trent Mosley and Mark Bowman, they struggled to move the ball on a down-to-down basis, and they gave up 204 yards on the ground to a Buckeye team that had struggled to run the ball at all this year. Voters treated this win as vindication and validation for Lincoln Riley, but I'm not sure this team is much different than we thought they were.