If No. 8 Alabama football is going to make the College Football Playoff, it’s going to need to make an unprecedented move. Since the playoff began, no teamed ranked as low as UA is at this point in the season has made the field of four.

When the CFP rankings were updated Tuesday evening, Alabama still hadn’t moved from the eighth spot, where it was when the selection committee began ranking teams this year. After the reveal, committee chair Boo Corrigan was asked on a teleconference whether a path to the playoff for Alabama exists at all.

Corrigan, as is his custom, didn’t have much to say.

“Good question, fair question, but it’s kind of asking us to project on where we are,” Corrigan said. “Our goal is to watch games this weekend, and it’ll be great to be able to watch them as a group as we go through it and as we’ve talked about before. Conference championships and head-to-heads and everything that we look at per the protocol will be in full effect of what we’re doing and making sure that we make the right decisions.”

The top four were, in order, Georgia, Michigan, Washington and Florida State.

Alabama faces No. 1 Georgia in the SEC championship game Saturday in Atlanta. There are three teams with one loss ranked ahead of the Tide, including No. 5 Oregon, No. 6 Ohio State and No. 7 Texas.

When asked how the committee came to rank the one-loss teams that way, Corrigan didn’t offer any specifics.

“The good news is everyone is weighing in to everything, where their opinions are, what their point is on each one of those teams,” Corrigan said. “All 11-1, all with good wins, all obviously have lost a game, and looking at it and as we came through the evaluation of that, after weighing many points and making sure that we took our time going through it, we ended up where we did at five, six, seven and eight.”

The one team to beat Alabama this season was Texas. That game came in Week 2, and the Crimson Tide hasn’t lost since, while the Longhorns fell to Oklahoma.

Corrigan didn’t answer the question when asked how much separation existed between the two teams, besides to compliment them both on good seasons. However, he did offer clarity as to how the committee viewed the loss to Texas, and whether games later in the season might be more important for resume purposes.

“Head-to-head is head-to-head, no matter when the game is played,” Corrigan said. “And that’s how we look at it.”

Alabama and Georgia are set to kick off at 3 p.m. CT Saturday in Atlanta. The game will be aired on CBS.