Mario Cristobal discusses College Football Playoff talk surrounding Oregon

Mario Cristobal does not want to talk about the College Football Playoff. But his Oregon team is right in the middle of the conversation, and they deserve the right. The Ducks went to Columbus in September and knocked off Ohio State, making them a true contender to make the playoff.

But then they lost to Stanford, albeit when their offensive coordinator Joe Moorehead was absent dealing with an illness. Both Oregon and Ohio State now have one loss, and if they both win out each have a solid resume to make the playoff.

But the Oregon head coach would prefer not to talk about the postseason at the moment. After the Ducks 34-31 win over UCLA last weekend, Cristobal discussed how his team is keeping the playoff talk outside of the locker room.

“Our guys really have a good grasp of understanding it is about today, it is about the next item on the agenda, it is about the play they are playing,” he said in his postgame press conference. “We’ve realize that works for us, we create our own issues. That’s a big moment when as a team you can recognize that. Now we all have to remind ourselves, I walk by 400 people and they have this thing [phone] jammed in their face. And that’s OK, that’s the world we live in.

“What I’m saying is we’re very real. There’s noise, that’s OK. That’s what makes college football awesome — the enthusiasm, the pageantry. But for the Ducks, it is back to work.”

The Ducks will continue to win out after the Stanford loss on Saturday. Oregon hosts 2-5 Colorado at 3:30 p.m. ET on FOX.

Paul Finebaum on Oregon, Ohio State and College Football Playoff rankings

No. 5 Ohio State and No. 7 Oregon won’t be the the highest-ranked one-loss team in the committee’s first College Football Playoff rankings, but they’ll hope to make their case heard alongside Alabama. The committee is set to release their first rankings on Tuesday night.

Oregon saw its AP ranking climb as high as No. 3 after defeating Ohio State on the road in Week 2, but after an upset loss to unranked Stanford, the Ducks’ College Football Playoff hopes are hanging by a thread.

Similarly, Ohio State had a clear path to the postseason but stirred uncertainty by losing to Oregon. But one thing remains clear to ESPN college football analyst Paul Finebaum — regardless of whether Oregon or Ohio State make it to the College Football Playoff, the Buckeyes should have a higher ranking at the onset.

“[The committee will] play games with us early on, but in the end, if this path continues, I don’t know how any reasonable college football people can sit in a room and say that Oregon is better than Ohio State,” Finebaum said Monday on McElroy and Cubelic in The Morning. “And I hear it every week. I was will one of our esteemed [ESPN] colleagues the other morning screaming about: ‘You can’t put Ohio State over Oregon.’ Well I would. Because I’m trying to base what’s happening now, not what happened the second weekend in September. Fair or not, that’s just how I see it.”