The College Football Playoff rankings came out last night, and it was not good for Penn State’s Cotton Bowl and/or Orange Bowl hopes. Despite losing to unranked South Carolina by 25 points and seeing their star quarterback go down with a torn ACL, the committee still decided to rank Tennessee ahead of Penn State. This is bad because the two-loss SEC teams — Tennessee, Alabama, and LSU — are essentially blocking the Nittany Lions from the Orange Bowl and Cotton Bowl.
We’ll get more into that later, but for this week’s rooting guide, I broke it down into two separate categories: one for the Rose Bowl and one for the Cotton Bowl/Orange Bowl.