The 13-member College Football Playoff selection committee met in Washington, D.C., this week, and it was announced that it will reveal four interim rankings before the inaugural selection weekend in 2014.

Of course, a little light bulb immediately fizzled to life -- bizzz-fizzzz! -- over the heads of many in the ESPN offices in lovely Bristol, Conn. Interim rankings? Why wait until 2014? Let's do it now. As in right now.

That's what everyone wants, right? The playoff to start this year, not next. Or so you think.

Stanford has played one of the nation's most difficult schedules -- and still has prospered. Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

The committee will be made up of 13 human beings, ready-made with their own ideas about evaluating and ranking college football teams. Many of them will be old-school, laboriously reviewing hours of game tape and giving teams their fearsome "sight test." Some will embrace the sabermetric revolution that has unceremoniously stomped on cherished sporting ideas such as clutch play, momentum and locker room chemistry.

For our purposes, the ESPN.com 2013 College Football Playoff Selection Committee will be made up of the guys who made A's in calculus in 10th grade and then moved on to the Jacobian conjecture: ESPN Stats & Information geniuses.

Those folks have devised an all-encompassing metric -- Championship Drive Ratings -- that measures the résumés of college football teams, putting a heavy emphasis on strength of schedule, as the CFP committee is expected to do. It measures how difficult it is for an average FBS team to achieve the team in question's results.

So, the season ends today, and based on Championship Drive Ratings -- drumroll, please -- the four-team playoff would go: 1. Alabama; 2. Stanford; 3. Florida State; 4. Ohio State.

That's right, unbeaten Baylor, you are eclipsed by Stanford, which lost to now-4-5 Utah on Oct. 12.

Got a feeling ESPN's Stats & Info's Q-rating just dropped precipitously in Waco.

The good news, of course, is the season doesn't end today. We were just making that up so Oregon fans could go, "Why couldn't you have done that a week ago?" Baylor's schedule is significantly backloaded, with a visit to No. 12 Oklahoma State on Nov. 23 looming large. CDR, although interesting to follow on a weekly basis, is ultimately about measuring the totality of the season because nothing is won in college football on Nov. 13.

Yet it is important, even at this juncture, to ask why an objective judgment of merit, such as CDR provides, ranks Stanford No. 2 and Baylor out of luck because it's the sort of distinction the CFP committee is going to make, and thereby make one or two or five fan bases livid.

Essentially, it was more difficult for Stanford to get to 8-1 against its schedule than for Baylor to get to 8-0. Or for Florida State and Ohio State to reach 9-0.

Stanford has three wins over teams in the CDR top 10. Only Ohio State has even one. The Cardinal are 5-1 versus the top 50. Baylor and Ohio State are just 2-0.

Further, the Utah loss is not as bad as it looks at first glance. The Utes have played the nation's toughest schedule: The combined FBS record of Utah's first nine opponents is 45-17 (.726). They have quality wins over BYU and Stanford. And they lost those five games by a combined 38 points.

Based on CDR, Utah is better than all but one team Baylor and Ohio State have played (Oklahoma and Wisconsin, respectively). The Utes are the fourth-best team Stanford played.