Warde Manuel discusses College Football Playoff committee ranking Tennessee behind 2-loss SEC foes: ‘It’s really splitting hairs’

There’s a logjam of two-loss SEC teams at the back end of the Top 12 of the latest College Football Playoff rankings. And coming out on the wrong end — though still ranked No. 11 — is Tennessee.

But that No. 11 ranking would see the Volunteers miss out on an at-large bid, as the No. 12- and 14-ranked teams project as conference champions getting automatic byes. And it was a close call, according to CFP selection committee chair Warde Manuel.

“Well, one, they just had a loss to Georgia, and they had the loss at Arkansas,” Manuel said. “It’s really splitting hairs. They have great offense, great defense. They play hard. The committee just had a hard time. You’re talking about four really good teams, when you look at Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Tennessee.”

The current four-team mix of two-loss SEC teams in the Top 12 includes No. 7 Alabama, No. 9 Ole Miss, No. 10 Georgia and the Volunteers at No. 11.

And within that quartet, there’s plenty of complication. Tennessee, Alabama and Ole Miss each have taken an upset loss of varying degrees (at Arkansas, vs. Vanderbilt and vs. Kentucky, respectively) and all four teams have played some combination of each other without a set of definitive results.

• Alabama: Beat Georgia, lost to Tennessee
• Ole Miss: Beat Georgia
• Georgia: Beat Tennessee, lost to Alabama
• Tennessee: Beat Alabama, lost to Georgia

And for the rest of the season, there are no more matchups amongst these teams outside of some potential SEC Championship Game matchups. And further adding to the complication is two-loss Texas A&M (only one conference loss) ranking at No. 15 and playing none of these teams, but still set to face No. 3 and one-loss Texas.

Which is all to say when push came to shove, the committee more or less graded the Crimson Tide, Rebels, Bulldogs and Volunteers on the eye test.

“I think the committee, we debated it, as I said earlier, quite a bit as it came down to how we saw those teams,” Manuel said. “But they have beaten each other at different times. So we have to look at Alabama the last three games, particularly the two before they played Mercer, they won in dominant fashion, and we were really impressed with their win at LSU two weeks ago.

“It is close. There’s a lot of conversations. We’ll continue to monitor the performance of all these teams as the season progresses towards the end.”