The College Football Playoff Committee had quite the challenge in front of them when it came to ranking Ohio State and Tennessee.
Both the Buckeyes and Volunteers boasted 10-2 records at the conclusion of the regular season, and each team suffered losses to a top-two team and an unranked opponent during their respective campaigns. Ultimately, the College Football Playoff committee opted to rank Ohio State No. 6 and Tennessee No. 7 — making the Buckeyes the No. 8 seed and the Volunteers the No. 9 seed in the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff Bracket.
As Ohio State and Tennessee held near-identical résumés into Sunday’s bracket reveal, College Football Playoff committee chairman Warde Manuel said that conversations on where to rank the two programs were extensive.
“When you look at their résumés, they're very similar,” Manuel said during a media teleconference. “In terms of how we saw them came down to the vote, and the discussion was heavy on both sides, really giving a lot of credit to both teams and then talking about some of their losses.”
With neither team playing on conference championship weekend, Manuel noted that the bulk of the committee’s decision regarding the two teams came directly after the regular season finale — which saw Ohio State lose to rival Michigan 13-10 at home.
“It was a very thorough discussion about those two because we knew as we went into it, they would not have another data point coming this week,” Manuel said. “It was really important for the committee to be extremely thorough last weekend in ranking and talking about those two teams.”
While the Buckeyes and Volunteers both endured similar losses, Ohio State earned a pair of wins over two other College Football Playoff qualifiers — Penn State and Indiana — while Tennessee’s best win came against No. 11 Alabama, which was the first team held out of the 12-team bracket.
“Ohio State also has two wins against Indiana and Penn State, both in the top ten,” Manuel said. “But Tennessee has that win over Alabama, who's 11th. So when you look at their resumes, they are very similar.”
As a result of the committee’s decision, Ohio State received the opportunity to host Tennessee at Ohio Stadium on Dec. 21 at 8 p.m. Manuel noted that the committee did not discuss the potential for either team to host the game, but rather focused on ranking them based on their respective résumés.
“We didn't determine how people host. That's not what our committee is doing. We're ranking the teams and the seeding principles come into effect,” Manuel said. “Ultimately as a committee and as we voted these teams, Ohio State was one ahead of Tennessee. We didn't look at it as ‘Well, if we put Ohio State at six and Tennessee at seven, one's going to host and one's not.’ I can assure everybody on this call that we never even talked about it until after the top 25 was ranked. I made sure in this room, that was not a point of consideration.”
