Former BCS computers see Notre Dame, Oklahoma State as equal

The weekend's college football results, which saw 40% of the Playoff selection committee's top 10 take losses, especially thinned the competition for the fourth and final seed in the postseason championship.

One of the biggest sources of speculation is how the committee might regard Notre Dame and Oklahoma State should they win out.

This week, the College Football Computer Composite won't do much to distiinguish them. The former BCS computers rank Notre Dame fourth among FBS teams this week, with Oklahoma State less than one one-hundredth of a place behind the Irish in fifth. Notre Dame's geometric mean ranking is 4.9593, and the Cowboys' is 4.9673.

And Notre Dame and Oklahoma State aren't the only tightly bunched pair in the top 10. Less than four one-hundredths of a place separates No. 7 Iowa and No. 8 Oklahoma.

In addition to the narrow margins between Playoff contenders, this week's ranking is notable for the fact that the order of the top six teams is unchanged from a week ago. That has never happened since the CFCC launched at the start of the 2014 season.

The team with the biggest rise this week is South Florida, which on Saturday beat a ranked team for the first time since 2007 and gained bowl eligibility for the first time in coach Willie Taggart's tenure at the school. The team with the biggest decline is Boise State, which lost at home for only the fifth time since 1999 when it fell to New Mexico. Like South Florida, the Lobos are bowl-eligible for the first time in coach Bob Davie's tenure at the school.

The College Football Computer Composite combines five of the computer formulas used in the former Bowl Championship Series standings to remove the human element from college football rankings. The computer rankings accounted for one-third of the final BCS rankings, with the Harris and Coaches polls comprising the other two-thirds.

The CFCC is compiled by taking the geometric mean of rankings formulated by Richard Billingsley, Wes Colley, Ken Massey,Jeff Sagarin and Peter Wolfe. Among the metrics feeding the CFCC are wins and losses, strength of schedule, home-field advantage, recency of game and, in Massey and Sagarin's case, margin of victory.

Updated CFCC rankings are published each week during the season on FootballFour.com. You can find every weekly ranking for 2015 here. This week's complete ranking of all 128 FBS teams is below.