Alaba­ma was No. 1 in the first Col­lege Foot­ball Play­off rank­ings of the sea­son Tues­day night, fol­lowed by Notre Dame, Clem­son and Ohio State.

Texas A&M was fifth and Flori­da was sixth, giv­ing the South­east­ern Con­fer­ence three of the top six teams along with Alabama.

Unbeat­en Cincin­nati from the Amer­i­can Ath­let­ic Con­fer­ence at sev­enth has the best rank­ing for a non-Pow­er Five team in the sev­en-year his­to­ry of the selec­tion committee’s top 25.

No. 8 North­west­ern, Geor­gia and Mia­mi round out the top-10.

Anoth­er unbeat­en team from out­side the Pow­er Five was not so high­ly regard­ed by the com­mit­tee. BYU was slot­ted 14th, behind No. 11 Okla­homa (6–2) and No. 13 Iowa State (6–2) among others.

The high­est ranked Pac-12 team was Ore­gon at 15th and South­ern Cal­i­for­nia was 18th.

Much the like this col­lege foot­ball sea­son in a pan­dem­ic, the rank­ings sched­ule has been delayed and trun­cat­ed this year.

The 13-per­son selec­tion com­mit­tee usu­al­ly starts rank­ings teams around Hal­loween and pro­duces six rank­ings before the final ones that deter­mine which 12 teams will play in the semi­fi­nals and major bowl games.

This is the first of four rank­ings lead­ing up to the only ones that real­ly count, sched­uled to be released on Dec. 20.

The pan­dem­ic didn’t stop the selec­tion com­mit­tee from meet­ing in per­son as usu­al at the Gay­lord Hotel in Grapevine Texas, just out­side of Dal­las. And the play­off itself is sched­uled to go off as sched­uled with the semi­fi­nals on Jan. 1 in the Rose Bowl and Sug­ar Bowl and the cham­pi­onship game Jan. 11 at Hard Rock Sta­di­um in Mia­mi Gar­dens, Florida.