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Peterson: South Carolina has every right to be pissed following penultimate CFP rankings
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Prior to Tuesday night’s College Football Playoff rankings reveal, I read a piece from On3’s Ari Wasserman — whom I often agree with — that asserted the teams on the bubble for the final CFP spot have no one to blame but themselves and don’t deserve much sympathy.
I agree to an extent.
Teams that want a chance to win a national championship don’t lose to Kentucky or Oklahoma or Vanderbilt, Wasserman wrote. And he’s right!
Guess who didn’t lose to any of those teams? Guess who actually blasted all 3 of those teams?
South Carolina beat Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Vanderbilt — all on the road — by a combined 94-22.
Ole Miss lost to Kentucky. Alabama lost to Oklahoma and Vanderbilt. They’re both ranked ahead of South Carolina in the CFP’s final ranking of the regular season. And CFP selection committee chair Warde Manuel said Tuesday night that teams that aren’t participating in conference championships this weekend will not see their spots shuffled in the final ranking.
“We don’t have a data point to re-arrange where we have those teams ranked,” Manuel said.
Alabama is in. Ole Miss and South Carolina are dead.
That’s a damn shame. South Carolina has my sympathy.
Ole Miss does not have a case in all this. The short: Don’t lose to Florida when you know you can’t afford a loss, or don’t lose to the worst Kentucky team of the Mark Stoops era at home. This should have come down to Alabama or South Carolina. And the case for Alabama can’t be anything other than the head-to-head result — Alabama won in Tuscaloosa 27-25 on Oct. 12. It’s fine if that’s the reason. South Carolina had a chance to win that game; it didn’t.
But head-to-head isn’t the end-all-be-all. It can’t be. If it was, we would decide our Playoff teams the way the NFL does. But we don’t. We have a subjective committee to parse through issues of worth. We have a subjective committee that, for instance, determines an unbeaten conference champ missing its starting quarterback is less deserving than a 1-loss team that didn’t play for its conference title. If head-to-head was the end-all-be-all, Texas wouldn’t be No. 2 and Georgia No. 5. If head-to-head was the end-all-be-all, Vanderbilt would have a case. If head-to-head was the end-all-be-all, Georgia freakin’ State would have a case.
South Carolina is playing better football right now. It has won 6 straight, including a victory over the previous No. 12 team in the CFP’s rankings on the road last Saturday. Alabama is 2 weeks removed from losing 24-3 to the 94th-ranked scoring offense in the country.
And, wait, why was Alabama slotted ahead of Miami?
“Both have had some losses that weren’t what they wanted out of those games,” Manuel said Tuesday night. “But in the last 3 games, Miami has lost twice.”
Huh.
I repeat, South Carolina has won 6 straight. Alabama lost to Oklahoma 2 weeks ago.
We can quibble with Clemson’s résumé, but the fact of the matter is the committee ranked the Tigers the No. 12 team in the country a week ago. South Carolina moved up 1 spot for beating them on the road. Alabama moved up 2 spots for beating a 5-7 Auburn team at home.
“To me, if the committee steps back and says, ‘Right now at this moment, who are the 12 best teams in college football?’ it’s hard to argue that we’re not one of them and the fact that we’ve won 6 games in a row, who we’ve beaten,” South Carolina coach Shane Beamer said on The Paul Finebaum Show this week. “I think 4 teams that we beat were ranked at the time that we beat them. One of only 3 teams in the country that can say that. Our strength of schedule. We’ve gone on the road and we’ve won on the road 3 times. Double-digit margin of victory, as well.”
If we flipped the situations, if Alabama was surging with South Carolina’s résumé, if South Carolina was recently beaten and had a head-to-head win over Alabama, the Crimson Tide would still be getting this spot.
And I can’t help but think about a rather unfortunate subplot in all of this.
If South Carolina were 10-2, there’s no discussion. So we have to talk about the LSU game. LaNorris Sellers got hurt and this play happened:
Hard to believe this call against LSU is going to cost South Carolina a spot in the College Football Playoff … pic.twitter.com/1KOeBj5IRG
— Brad Crawford (@BCrawford247) December 2, 2024
That is going to decide a Playoff spot?
The past 2 years have been bad for the sport. The decision to exclude Florida State was bad for the sport. The way the committee has turned into a weekly contradiction is bad for the sport. Consistency is non-existent.
The beauty of the 12-team field is that the last teams in are flawed. They don’t have to be perfect to play for a title. They played their way in, through one path or another, but they don’t have an iron-clad case. They got in not because they were more deserving, but because the selection committee liked their particular set of pros more. This is what we wanted when we expanded the field. And we asked a panel of humans with biases and agendas to set that field.
They’re supposed to turn on the tape. If we’re going to ignore what our eyes are telling us and fall back on lukewarm “best team” arguments, why do we have a committee in the first place?
Derek Peterson does a bit of everything, not unlike Taysom Hill. He has covered Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Pac-12, and now delivers CFB-wide content.
