The College Football Playoff committee released its inaugural rankings for the 2024 season on Tuesday night with Tennessee football landing at No. 7. It’s a new look 12-team playoffs this season which expands the importance of the committees rankings past the top eight to the top 20 teams or so.
Michigan Director of Athletics and College Football Playoff chairman Warde Manuel answered questions from the media on Tuesday night including some brief thoughts on why Tennessee landed where they did.
“Tennessee has an impressive win over Alabama at No. 11 and wins over North Carolina State and Oklahoma, 4-1 against teams above .500,” Manuel said. “The loss at Arkansas was something that we discussed a lot.”
There are two note worthy things here and the first is about the Vols’ 4-1 record against teams with a winning record. While Tennessee earned wins over ranked opponents NC State and Oklahoma, both of those teams have struggled badly since those matchups.
Despite that, Tennessee is still getting some credit for those wins as well as its victory over Florida and obviously its one undoubtedly strong win over Alabama.
But the negative is that the committee discussed Tennessee’s loss against Arkansas a lot and I think it’s pretty evident in the initial rankings.
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One loss teams Texas and Penn State ranked directly ahead of Tennessee with the same record and no wins better than the Vols’ win over Alabama. But both teams losses came against teams much better Arkansas as Texas fell at home to Georgia and Penn State fell at home to Ohio State.
There are a few rankings that suggest the alternative, including two-loss Alabama being all the way at No. 10, but Penn State and Texas being ahead of Tennessee seems to indicate that the committee values the quality of the loss over the quality of the best win.
There’s still four weeks of the regular season remaining as well as the conference championship games so many of the debates will work themselves out on the field over the next month.
“Playoff rankings at this point don’t matter. You don’t have control over it,” Tennessee head coach Josh Heupel said earlier this week. “What you do have control over is your your preparation and and how you play. Ultimately, that determines where you’re at or where you’re not at. And for this football team, understanding that we got to continue to grow and get better and control those things that we’re in control of. And this team has got to continue to get better. So it will be out on Tuesday night. And you remember what the first rankings were last year? I don’t either. Right? So it doesn’t matter. What they remember is where you finish here as November wraps up.”
Tennessee returns to the field on Saturday night when they host a struggling Mississippi State team (2-7, 0-5 SEC) at Neyland Stadium. The Vols biggest remaining challenge comes in next week when Tennessee faces No. 3 Georgia in Athens.
