Warde Manuel defends Ole Miss landing behind Clemson, Alabama in College Football Playoff ranking
Ole Miss is fighting for its College Football Playoff life and needs some help to make the 12-team playoff. Ranked 14th in the nation, losses by Clemson and Alabama would go a long way to start that process.
The Rebels play Mississippi State on Friday and are heavily favored. It might’ve surprised some pundits and fans Tuesday when the College Football Playoff committee had Clemson ahead of Alabama and Ole Miss.
Committee chair Warde Manuel shared why. When it came to having two losses and its play as of late, Clemson got the nod. The Tigers face South Carolina this weekend in a huge game for playoff hopes.
“Clemson slid up with some losses ahead of them by Alabama and Mississippi, and they had a win against Citadel, obviously, but that wasn’t the big reason,” Manuel said Tuesday evening. “Obviously they’re at 9-2, with only two losses. The teams right behind them have three losses. We just felt as a committee as we looked at their body of work, with three straight wins after their loss to Louisville, including back-to-back wins against Virginia Tech and Pitt, that they deserved to move up into that 12th position.”
When asked to compare the resumes of Alabama and Ole Miss, the 13th and 14th teams in the country respectively both were up-and-down this season.
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“I would say in the committee’s eyes, they’re really similar teams, and they’ve had similar ways that they’ve gone through the season,” Manuel said. “Both have had losses that you didn’t expect them to have. Alabama had a loss at Oklahoma, and Oklahoma’s performance was dominant against Alabama, and then you have the loss by Mississippi to Florida at Florida. It was one of those losses that you just don’t expect them to have. It was a close game, but where we evaluated it, we came out with Alabama ahead of Mississippi and South Carolina since Alabama and Mississippi both won head to head against South Carolina.”
The College Football Playoff committee will need to do a deeper dive on many teams to understand their story when the final rankings are revealed. Ole Miss has some critical wins and also some glaring losses on its resume. Arguably, the Rebels have the biggest win of the year, dominating Georgia in Oxford.
“One of the things that we talk about is teams can only play the schedule they have in front of them against the teams that have been, from a conference standpoint, assigned,” Manuel said. “We can maybe be critical of non-conference schedules and those kind of things, but when it gets to the conference, particularly as these conferences have expanded, there are more teams to play throughout the conference.
“Teams can only play the schedule that’s in front of them. They can only play the opponents that they have. So we take the stance that we’re going to really look at these games, we’re going to look at the stats, we’re going to look at the strength of schedule, but we’re also going to look at how teams are performing against the competition that they have.”
