ATHENS — Georgia coach Kirby Smart chuckled when asked about what the first set of College Football Playoff rankings indicate about how the new selection committee is measuring teams.

“I have no clue,” said Smart, who is preparing his Bulldogs for a trip to play Mississippi State at noon on Saturday in Starkville.

“… haven’t even peeked at any of that, we’ve got our hands full.”

Georgia is ranked No. 5 in the first set of rankings, which will be released each week leading up to the final set of CFP rankings which will set the field for the 12-team playoff.

If the season were to end today — and to be clear, there’s so much football left, current rankings can’t be assumed — it would, as the No. 5 seed, play a No. 12 seed that projects to be the highest-ranked Group of Five champion, which currently is projected to be Memphis.

The CFP rankings came under scrutiny last season when three-loss SEC teams Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina were passed over in the rankings for at-large spots in the field by teams from other conferences who had a better record, but did not play as difficult of a schedule.

CFP selection committee chairman Mack Rhoads explained on Tuesday night that a new metric has been added for the committee to consider when ranking the teams, while the strength of schedule metric has been adjusted.

“We introduced the new metric, which is record strength, which measures how well a team performs against its schedule,” Rhoads said on the Tuesday night CFP teleconference, “and that’s a cumulative sum of scores as we progress through the year.

“And then we took schedule strength and we tweaked it …. we put more weight on the stronger teams, and so that was the adjustment for schedule strength.”

The current “strength of record” rankings, per ESPN, show Texas A&M at No. 1, followed by Indiana, Ohio State, BYU, Alabama, Georgia, Ole Miss, Oregon, Texas and Texas Tech.

Smart, as he has shared in the past, does not get caught up or influenced by rankings, and has noted each committee values different metrics more than others.

“I do know that it’ll take care of itself if you handle your business, and if you don’t, you’ll be worried about a lot of those things,” Smart said on the SEC teleconference on Wednesday. “That’s just the state of college football and where it is.

“I’m trying to control what we can control right now, it’s in our hands.”

College Football Playoff Schedule

First Round

• Friday, Dec. 19: 8 p.m.

• Saturday, Dec. 20: Noon, 3:30 p.m., 7:30 p.m.

Quarterfinals

Wednesday, Dec. 31, 7:30 p.m., Goodyear Cotton Bowl, Arlington, Texas

Thursday, Jan. 1, Noon, Capital One Orange Bowl, Miami Gardens, Fla.

Thursday, Jan. 1, 4 p.m., Rose Bowl, Pasadena, Calif.

Thursday, Jan. 1, 8 p.m., Allstate Sugar Bowl, New Orleans

Semifinals

Thursday, Jan. 8, 7:30 p.m., Vrbo Fiesta Bowl, Glendale, Ariz.

Friday, Jan. 9, 7:30 p.m., Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, Atlanta

National Championship

Monday, Jan. 19, 7:30 p.m., Hard Rock Stadium, Miami Gardens, Fla.