If you're going to lose to your archrival when it has five losses, it's best to have two top-10 wins in your back pocket.
That's the lesson Ohio State learned (extremely reluctantly, of course) when it landed at No. 6 in the College Football Playoff rankings on Tuesday evening. Despite having two losses with one being a rather humiliating one at home, the Buckeyes' wins over No. 3 Penn State and No. 9 Indiana were enough to all but lock up a home playoff game with their landing ahead of Tennessee.
As it stands, eight-seeded Ohio State would play the ninth-seeded Volunteers in the Shoe in the first round of the inaugural 12-team CFP, and CFP committee chairman and Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel cited those two wins as the top reason why.
"Very similar resumes," Manuel said of Ohio State and Tennessee. "Ohio State is 2-1 against top-10 teams. They have the win over Indiana and the win over Penn State. One of their two losses is to the No. 1 team in the country and then obviously the loss to Michigan last week. Tennessee also has had an impressive resume. They have two losses against Arkansas and against No. 5 Georgia. So they're very close. It was a constant conversation as to how we saw both teams, a lot of deliberation on them."
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Manuel and the committee's awareness of the volatile nature of rivalry games also helped Ohio State to some extent, it seems. Saturday's 13-10 loss for the Buckeyes in The Game is more than enough for Ryan Day to be on the chopping block and to drop them to No. 7 in the AP Poll and No. 8 in the Coaches Poll. But the committee set aside recency bias and felt the whole of Ohio State's résumé was enough to keep them ahead of several other Power Four teams with two losses after extensive discussion in the committee room.
"We recognize there are rivalry games, and (when) we talk about those games, we realize they're highly packed with emotions," Manuel said. "There are times when, as we say, everybody says, you can throw out the record book in those big rivalry games. So we do recognize when those games happen and when they're played, and we evaluate them accordingly and still put the same sort of evaluation to it, but recognizing that it's a very big game for both teams."
Ohio State isn't ahead of every two-loss squad in the rankings, however. Georgia surged past the Buckeyes to No. 5 with its 10-2 record ahead of its SEC Championship Game on Saturday despite a loss to Georgia Tech this past weekend.
"The two losses by Georgia were to ranked teams in Alabama and Mississippi, both on the road," Manuel said. "You look at Ohio State having two great wins, a loss on the road at Oregon, a loss at home. It was a great conversation, both of them having very strong offenses and very strong defenses. It was a back-and-forth between the two, and the outcome of the vote was really close in terms of where they fell. But the outcome of the vote had Georgia at No. 5 and Ohio State at No. 6."
While Manuel said that the committee won't change any rankings between teams not playing in conference championship games with no new data points – Tennessee and Ohio State both failed to make theirs – there is a shot that Penn State can fall behind the Buckeyes if the Nittany Lions lose handily enough to No. 1 Oregon in the Big Ten title game. In that case, Ohio State would move up to the seventh seed and play the 10th seed at home, likely Indiana or Alabama.
Whatever Ohio State's first-round matchup is, it will face that team on either Dec. 20 at 8 p.m. or Dec. 21 at noon, 4 p.m. or 8 p.m.
