Warde Manuel broke down the selection committee’s post-Week 12 rankings with college football media on Tuesday night on his weekly teleconference.

Manuel, who is in his first season as the CFP selection committee chair, covered a lot of ground in his meeting with college football media. Concerning the SEC, Manuel was asked about the potential conflict in logic the committee showed by ranking South Carolina 1 spot ahead of LSU. The Tigers beat the Gamecocks in Columbia earlier this season in a head-to-head matchup.

Manuel said the the committee felt like those programs have “gone in different directions” since that game at South Carolina. As a result, the Gamecocks are at No. 21 this week while LSU is at No. 22.

“Yeah, it really came down to the committee felt that since that game, South Carolina and LSU have gone in different directions,” Manuel said. “South Carolina has had some wins in that time frame, and LSU has had 2 consecutive losses. So the feeling was we do look at head-to-head. We obviously consider that closely. We look at that in our evaluation and determine when a team — we take a good hard look when teams play head-to-head and the outcome of the game.

“But in this particular case, we also looked at the body of work and where those teams are, and so the discussion amongst the committee really came down to factoring in everything, in particular, where those teams were since that game was played, and obviously LSU struggled the last two weeks, and South Carolina has really performed admirably since that loss to LSU.”

South Carolina has 3 losses so far this season, but 2 of them were extremely close. Since narrowly losing in Tuscaloosa on Oct. 12, South Carolina has won 3 consecutive games vs. SEC opponents in dominant fashion.

Meanwhile, LSU has lost back-to-back games to Texas A&M and Alabama. The Tigers have been out-scored 73-19 over their last 6 quarters of football.

Spenser Davis

Spenser is a news editor for Saturday Down South and covers college football across all Saturday Football brands.