Mississippi State hanging onto No. 1 in new college football polls

As expected, Mississippi State remains No. 1 both polls, holding onto its first-ever top spot despite a road challenge at Kentucky.

Florida State remains No. 2, while Alabama moves up to No. 3 after Ole Miss' loss to LSU -- despite Ole Miss beating Alabama earlier in the year. The Rebels plunge in both polls, but fall harder in the coaches.

None of this technically matters all that much, as the first College Football Playoff rankings come out Tuesday. Those will set the tone for the rankings from there on out, and those will be the only ones that will actually sway the postseason. We'll see if the top five has any major shakeup due to that.

Here are the rankings as they stand, with more to come Monday:

The four rankings we use:

The Associated Press Top 25: The longest-running and best-respected human poll. Didn't have any official bearing on the latter years of the BCS, and won't have any official bearing on the Playoff. Expect it to set the course for the committee, however, as most outlets (including SB Nation) will use the AP's rankings as the standard until the committee takes over in late October. Usually comes out Sundays around 2 p.m. ET.

The USA Today Coaches Poll: Formerly part of the BCS, and now just a poll. It tends to be more conservative than the AP's. Though polling athletic departments in order to rank other athletic departments is dubious, we still want multiple human polls in here, and it's the other big one. Releases early Sunday afternoons.

The Massey Rating: An early-Sunday computer ranking. This is not the Massey formula the BCS used, which excluded margin of victory.

Football Outsiders' F/+ rating: A synthesis of ratings by smart persons Bill Connelly and Brian Fremeau and our personal go-to overall team stat. It tends to come out later than the others.

Last week's composite Top 25: