Predicting Michigan football's College Football Playoff ranking

The Michigan Wolverines escaped Wrigley Field with a narrow 24-22 win over Northwestern this past Saturday to improve its record to 8-2 and remain in the hunt for a berth in the College Football Playoff.

On Tuesday night, the College Football Playoff Selection Committee will release its third top 25 of the season at 8:30 p.m. EST, and will continue to do so each week until the final rankings are revealed on Dec. 7. Last Tuesday, the Wolverines checked in at No. 18 ahead of the game against the Wildcats.

In light of how Michigan played and other results for the weekend, will Michigan move up, down or remain in that No. 18 spot heading into this Saturday's game at Maryland? Let's break it down and make a prediction.

Predicting where Michigan will rank

While the top top 10 should see some sort of shakeup considering the Oklahoma victory over Alabama and Texas getting shellacked by Georgia, teams in front of the Wolverines did their job for the most part to the point where there isn't a whole lot of room for Michigan to move up in the rankings.

It would be one thing if the Wolverines blew out the Wildcats last weekend, but needing a last second field goal to win, even though Michigan did dominate the game statistically and let Northwestern hang around due to its own mistakes, probably won't do much to impress the committee.

However, there is a slight window for the Wolverines to move up a spot to No. 17 due to Georgia Tech barely surviving a game against one win Boston College.

The Yellow Jackets were ranked at No. 16 by the committee last week and could very well move down considering their performance against the Eagles. Georgia Tech won in the same fashion as the Wolverines with a late field goal, but it's not as if it was a fluke that Boston College was in the game.

Georgia Tech's defense gave up 537 yards to the Boston College offense, whereas the Wolverines allowed under 250 yards against the Wildcats and doubled them in total yardage despite the game being close on the scoreboard.

I think the committee could very well look at Georgia Tech and bump them down a couple spots due to the lackluster performance. Even though the Wolverines had a disaster of a fourth quarter at Wrigley, it was not indicative of how the game was going overall.