Why uva is going to the Orange Bowl

There's still some group of VT fans (and possibly Wake Forest fans) who are holding on to hope that #23 UVA will drop out of the rankings after getting blown out by Clemson on Saturday.  By doing so, that will open up the ACC slot in the Orange Bowl to whichever conference member the bowl wants to invite.

I say this as a diehard Virginia Tech fan that hates everything about UVA - Give up on the Orange Bowl, Hokies.

Historically, the committee has not horribly punished teams for losing their conference championship games.  Sure, teams may drop a spot or two, but there hasn't been a drastic drop for most teams.  Probably the biggest championship game loss by a ranked team in the CFP era was 2018 Northwestern losing to Ohio State by a score of 45-24.  They only dropped one spot in the rankings.

But there are a couple of very simple reasons why UVA will not drop out of the rankings.

First, there must be 25 teams in the top 25.  If one falls out, another must take their place.  All of the unranked Power 5 teams are idle during championship weekend.  So, why would the committee suddenly decide that a team who wasn't worthy of the top 25 last week is suddenly worthy next week when that team didn't play?

More importantly, it's a matter of time.  For all of the other rankings, the committee can think about the games on Sunday, meet on Monday and Tuesday, and release the rankings on Tuesday night.  For the final rankings, they watch the championship games together and then have to come up with the final rankings by noon on Sunday, barely 12 hours after all of the games are done.

The simplest solution for the committee is to drop UVA to #24 or #25, move Navy and Oklahoma State up a spot, and then turn their attention to debate over who the fourth team in the semi-finals should be, which is their primary mission.  Why waste time debating yet another team that isn't on their list going into this weekend?

Finally, it's a matter of protecting the interest of their stakeholders.  Dropping UVA out of the rankings can cause harm to the Orange Bowl, which is one of the New Year's Six bowls that the committee is responsible for arranging.  There's already enough ranked teams from the other conferences to fill the contracted New Year's Six bowl slots, and the only at-large spot will have to be filled by a top 10 team.  Therefore, a #25 ranking has absolutely no bearing on the NY6 bowls.  It doesn't even affect the other bowls.