Paul Finebaum: Alabama has 'clearly better' College Football Playoff resume than South Carolina, Ole Miss

Paul Finebaum can’t fathom Alabama being behind South Carolina and Ole Miss when it comes to the College Football Playoff rankings.

He said the Crimson Tide have a clearly better resume than their SEC counterparts. At least at this point, it’s probably down to Alabama and South Carolina, should the two be up for one final spot.

But Finebaum thinks it’s Alabama clearly and perhaps South Carolina doesn’t even have enough juice to pass Ole Miss.

“Well, I bounced all over the place with Alabama, South Carolina and Ole Miss, but in the end, I think Alabama clearly has the better resume,” Finebaum said on McElroy and Cubelic. “We know South Carolina is playing better today, and I don’t think Ole Miss is even in the conversation. 

“And you can tell the desperation of Lane Kiffin by what he put out yesterday. So, I mean, I think Alabama is going to be on that cut line, whether they’re inside or out, whether they catch a break next week, like, I mean, they caught a couple of breaks this week, with this past weekend. A couple of more could have gone their way with Georgia going down and perhaps what started out at Vanderbilt, but ultimately, I think they are going to have to sweat it out all the way down to Sunday at noon.”

Finebaum also noted South Carolina is ascending and probably playing the best football out of the three teams. However, head to head has to matter and South Carolina lost to both Alabama and Ole Miss.

“I think you have to look at where a team is right now and clearly South Carolina is ascending,” Finebaum said. “I mean, if we don’t know then Shane Beamer will tell us. Number two, head to head, has to factor in … I mean, sometimes you can have a weird head to head, but in this case, the head to head between Alabama and South Carolina, I think, doesn’t matter as much as the head to head between Ole Miss and South Carolina. I mean, that wasn’t a close game. 

“And South Carolina, it’s hard for me to rank them over Ole Miss. It would be hard for me to rank them over Alabama and back to a minute ago. You know who has South Carolina beaten? They beat Clemson, which could be a four loss team Saturday night. Is that right? So that doesn’t do me a lot of good. Georgia is still, to me, the deciding factor why I am going to rank Alabama ahead of Ole Miss and then South Carolina third in that group.”

Plus, Finebaum didn’t want to deal with hypotheticals talking about Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina.

“One last thing on South Carolina, you know what South Carolina’s strongest argument is,” Finebaum said. “It’s a play that didn’t matter. Their argument is that they won the LSU game which they didn’t, so let’s move them aside.”