AP Top 25 voters have explaining to do ranking Alabama behind Georgia

On a Saturday chock full of shocking upsets, none came close to Alabama's loss to Vanderbilt. There are many ways to drive home just how unlikely that 40-35 final score was, but to review: It was the Crimson Tide's first loss to Vandy in four decades, and the Commodores' first win ever over a team ranked in the top five — much less No. 1 overall. It was enough to send Alabama from cloud nine all the way into an existential spiral, with fans and media members spending the last few days questioning everything about Kalen DeBoer's ability to lead this program into a post-Nick Saban world.

So believe us when we say that we aren't taking that loss lightly. It's unacceptable, and it's more than enough cause for us to seriously rethink Alabama's national title and College Football Playoff hopes this year. And yet, despite all that, even we couldn't quite believe our eyes when we saw where the latest AP Top 25 poll had the Tide ranked.

AP Top 25 voters overreact to Vanderbilt loss by putting Alabama behind Georgia

Alabama fell from No. 1 all the way down to seventh in this week's poll — in a vacuum, not an unfair drop considering the magnitude of that upset. But it's the teams surrounding the Tide that have us scratching our heads. Well, one team in particular: Ranked fifth, two spots in front of Alabama, is none other than ... Georgia, the team the Tide just beat two weeks ago.

Head-to-head matchups obviously shouldn't be the be-all, end-all of where a team gets ranked; that would cause all sorts of chaos if taken to its logical conclusion. But that doesn't mean that head-to-head matchups shouldn't matter at all. The results on the field still need to stand for something, and when two teams with similar resumes have a head-to-head result between them, you need a really good reason to throw that result aside.

And really, despite the Vandy loss, Alabama and Georgia are pretty similar on paper right now. Yes, the Tide have that loss to the Commodores, but they also have a win over an elite team. Georgia, by contrast, can only really boast the season-opening victory over Clemson — and with all due respect due Cade Klubnik's resurgence over the last few weeks, we'd like to see a little more from the Tigers before we start using them as a resume booster.

Really, the best argument for ranking Georgia so highly is that their loss is better than Alabama's. But that conveniently leaves out that Georgia's loss is to Alabama. Why do we wind up punishing the Tide for thinking highly of them? If we're considering that to be such a quality loss, wouldn't that be an argument for just putting Alabama ahead of the Dawgs anyway? And it's not like Georgia has been spotless otherwise; this team very well should've lost to Kentucky back in September, and it was hardly overwhelming against Auburn on Saturday.

What we have, then, are two one-loss teams that have a lot of plusses on the resume but also some blemishes. There's very little to separate them, and the advanced stats agree. A sport as fragmented as college football should always be advocating for the head-to-head to matter, and this was an obvious opportunity to let it carry the day.