As a University of Washington graduate, I’m mildly annoyed by my alma mater’s exclusion from the top four in the intial College Football Playoff rankings released earlier this week.

For two reasons, however, I’m not yet joining the conspiracy theorists who are outraged by unbeaten Washington’s relegation to fifth place in the rankings.

With four weeks remaining in the regular season, followed by the Pac-12 Conference championship game, such venom is premature. And by blaming ranking committee members instead of the NCAA hierarchy, the anger is misdirected.

Most of the tweaks to the college football national championship format in recent years have been for the better. The playoff field has been doubled from two to four teams. Human committee members have thankfully replaced computer rankings in determining the title contenders.

But the NCAA didn’t go far enough in expanding the field. An eight-team tournament is the only logical format.

An eight-team playoff would be almost ridiculously simple to implement.

The champions of the five power conferences would receive automatic bids. The committee would then be responsible for selecting three other at-large teams and seeding the quarterfinalists.

There are those who contend that the champions of some conferences (the Big 12 this year, for example) would sometimes not rank among the nation’s best eight teams. But it’s best to eliminate subjective judgments from the equation as much as possible. After all, NFL wild-card teams have been known to win the Super Bowl.

In any event, the quarterfinals would be staged at the sites of the higher-seeded teams in mid-December. The semifinals would take place New Year’s Day (not New Year’s Eve) at traditional bowl locations, with the title game to follow perhaps 10 days later at a neutral site. What’s the problem?

The problem, of course, is that an eight-team playoff would further diminish the impact of lucrative bowl games. The NCAA’s standard argument that a three-week football tournament would compromise the academic process is bogus, since the college football season already lasts four months and three-week tourneys are already in place in several other sports, including basketball and baseball.

Although I’m not certain committee members gave the Huskies appropriate credit for their 44-6 beatdown of a Stanford team that is experiencing a down season but still owns wins over Notre Dame and USC, I can’t argue with them dinging the Dawgs for the quality of their non-conference schedule. Rutgers, whose 0-5 record in the Big Ten includes a 78-0 loss to Michigan, might have been the most formidable of Washington’s non-league opponents.

It might not be a coincidence that the Huskies sought to immediately upgrade their non-league slate by agreeing to open the 2018 season against Auburn in Atlanta.

My only gripe with the initial CFP rankings was that the No. 4 slot occupied by Texas A&M creates the possibility of two Southeastern Conference teams making the final four.

Nobody is disputing that Alabama, the unbeaten reigning national champion, deserves the No. 1 ranking. But the popular notion that the SEC is head and shoulders above other conferences in top-to-bottom quality is, in my view, a myth.

Texas A&M, for example, was taken into overtime this season by a UCLA team that currently sports a 3-6 record. Oregon, during its glory years, fared very well against SEC foes. And after barely surviving a Washington State challenge before prevailing in its 2013 season opener, 31-24, Auburn went on to play for the national championship (losinga thriller to Florida State in the title game).

The Pac-12 Conference might not quite be as strong at the top as the SEC. But there’s a reason why not many Pac-12 teams finish unbeaten in conference play. As Oregon State demonstrated by nearly upsetting Washington State last week, few Pac-12 contests can be considered cinches.

Since it is in the same SEC division as Alabama, Texas A&M could conceivably be selected for a national semifinal berth without playing in its conference championship game.

That should never be allowed to happen. There are some instances — an unbeaten team losing narrowly to a once-beaten foe in a conference title game, for example — that would justify two clubs from the same conference making the final four. But no contender should be allowed to benefit from bypassing a significant hurdle.

Conventional wisdom holds that, despite their current status, the Huskies will be selected for a semifinal berth if they run the table in their remaining games.

I’m frankly skeptical that will happen. The Huskies already have two close calls — against Utah and Arizona — to their credit. With tough road tests against California and Washington State, a home game against USC and a potential conference championship contest looming, it seems likely they’ll slip at least once.

Husky fans should chill out about the CFP rankings for now. There will be plenty of time for outrage if an unbeaten Washington team is somehow excluded from the national title picture.

Rick Anderson: (360) 537-3924; randerson@thedailyworld.com