How else can you explain a team that two weeks ago jumped Baylor (which has a better resume) and this week failed to drop after a dangerously close victory over three-win Indiana — and the awful, 14-point home loss to six-loss Virginia Tech looking worse every week.

“It’s important to be hitting your stride,” said Ohio State coach Urban Meyer. “I wouldn’t say we’re hitting our stride. But if you evaluate our team compared to Week 1, it’s still the most-improved team.”

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At this point, it’s a simple process for the Buckeyes: beat Michigan this weekend in Columbus, and win the Big Ten Championship Game next week (vs. Minnesota or Wisconsin), and reach that coveted No. 4 spot in the semifinals.

The best of the Big 12 isn’t stopping Ohio State’s rise, nor is the second-best team in the SEC West Division. If you can’t see this playing out by now, you’re not following the clues.

It began with the aforementioned rise and failure to fall, and includes:

— Mississippi State staying in the top four after losing on the road to Alabama. The Bulldogs couldn’t fall more, because if they did, the overwhelming response would have been how do you drop your No. 1 from Day 1 of the CFP poll out of the top four because it lost by five points on the road?

So what do you do? You wait until the final week of the season to drop the Bulldogs, and the reasoning is simple: they not only didn’t win their conference, they didn’t win their division.

— Because the Big 12 doesn’t have a championship game; because the Big 12 has told the CFP they don’t use head-to-head to determine conference champions (like, you know, every other sport in the history of sports), it allows the CFP to declare the co-championship isn’t as strong as Ohio State’s Big Ten title. Because with that extra Big Ten game, Ohio State will have played as many conference games as either TCU or Baylor.

Is this something the committee actively speaks about? No. But they certainly — and committee chairman Jeff Long has confirmed — have talked about weighting conference championships only after they’ve been awarded.

It’s an utterly laughable concept that Ohio State is the most scrutinized of the one-loss teams. The Buckeyes have essentially already been awarded their spot in the semifinals.

They just have to win and lock it up.

2. The (cracked) Egg Bowl

One injury, one freakish, hard-to-believe injury and subsequent losses have completely changed the dynamic of the Egg Bowl.

Win or lose, Ole Miss — and the key injury to wideout Laquon Treadwell — has derailed Mississippi State’s chances of playing in the CFP.

Without the injury (and the fumble at the goal line) Ole Miss beats Auburn and the month of November looks strikingly different for the Rebels. With the injury (and the fumble), Ole Miss doesn’t look nearly as impressive of a win for Mississippi State.

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In fact, now the Bulldogs are also competing against what Arkansas last week did to Ole Miss. If Mississippi State doesn’t beat Ole Miss as badly as Arkansas did (30-0), what does the CFP make of a Mississippi State team whose biggest wins earlier this season now don’t look so impressive?

If Mississippi State doesn’t look dominant against Ole Miss, you better believe the CFP will look at the way five-loss Arkansas pounded the Rebels as a barometer of Mississippi State’s resume.

It’s not fair because they’re completely different games, but when you’re splitting hairs among four teams for one CFP spot, everything counts.

3. Time to show up, ‘Noles

How many slow starts ending in victories can Jameis Winston and FSU have in a season? (Getty Images)

Think about this: if Florida somehow upsets Florida State this weekend, the Gators will have fired a coach who beat both of their bitter rivals (Georgia, FSU).

Don’t think Florida can’t win; the Gators went into Tallahassee two years ago and beat FSU with a team not any better than this one. Of course EJ Manuel was playing quarterback for that FSU team, and this ‘Noles team has the best big game, big moment quarterback in college football in Jameis Winston.

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While FSU has struggled all season to stop power running games (and that’s what Florida does best), the Gators have zero ability to press the ‘Noles in the passing game. In other words, FSU can load up to stop the run — and not allow the Gators to extend runs to the perimeter like Georgia did for some unknown coaching reason.

It’s not a difficult game plan: funnel everything between the tackles, set the edge and don’t let the play get around it. If that means you give up QB Treon Harris in the run game, so be it. Spy with a safety and force him to throw to win.

For some reason, Georgia couldn’t grasp that concept.

Even if FSU starts slowly again (at this point, we should expect it), Florida isn’t running so far away that another second half performance by Winston won’t solve.  

4. The Big truth

Here’s the problem the Big 12 faces in the final two weeks of the season: no single win will be enough for either Baylor or TCU.

Because no single win will stand out enough to secure the coveted fourth spot in the CFP.

A TCU win over Texas will be viewed more as something that’s expected instead of something it would be: a big win on the road against a team that’s playing much better than it was in September and October.

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TCU’s final game, vs. Iowa State (winless in Big 12), will only hurt its case — because the rest of the one-loss teams will be playing significant games. Then there’s Baylor, which for weeks has been playing to the bar set by TCU — a team it beat.

That’s why Baylor didn’t move from No. 7 ahead of Ohio State: the 21-point win over Oklahoma State wasn’t as impressive as TCU’s 33-point win over Oklahoma State. And if the Bears don’t annihilate Texas Tech this weekend like TCU did (82-27; the game everyone first noticed TCU), they’ll stand stagnant again.

That leaves Baylor with the season finale against top 10 Kansas State, another game where the Bears must beat K-State worse than TCU did (by 21). See where this is headed?

Both Baylor and TCU will need multiple losses in front of them to reach the CFP semifinals.

5. Look beyond the narrative

So UCLA is the hot team now, the one that could come from outside the top 10 when the CFP poll began to finding a spot in the semifinals on the last day of the regular season.

While that sounds like a fascinating story, let’s not forget about those two UCLA losses: both at home; one to Oregon (by 12), one to Utah (by two). And then there are the key wins: Arizona State (without its starting QB Taylor Kelly), four-loss USC and at home against Arizona.

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Buried in UCLA’s five-game winning streak that has generated this narrative of “the hottest team” in the game, is a two-point win over six-loss Cal and an overtime win over two-win Colorado.

One more probably important factor: becoming the team that reaches the semifinals after beginning outside the top 10 in the first poll not only means chaos in front of the Bruins the next two weeks, more important, it means UCLA beating Oregon in the Pac-12 Championship Game.

UCLA has lost its last six games to Oregon by a combined 126 points, or 21 points per game. Translation: let’s start with beating Stanford this weekend — which UCLA hasn’t beaten since 2008 and has lost six straight — before we move to the fantasy of some unthinkable run to the semifinals.