Warde Manuel explains South Carolina slotting ahead of LSU in College Football Playoff rankings

LSU might’ve beaten South Carolina on the field earlier this season — albeit with some officiating controversy — but come College Football Playoff rankings time, the Gamecocks had leapfrogged the Tigers.

That was, in the explanation of selection committee chair Warde Manuel, due to the whole body of work trumping the head-to-head comparison for both teams. The fact LSU had won factored in, but both teams recent track records mattered more.

“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 two 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.”

Since losing to LSU in mid-September, the Gamecocks have only lost two other times, both to current Top 10 teams and have since won three in a row. That included a 44-20 thrashing of ranked Texas A&M.

LSU, meanwhile, looked strong for much of the first half of the season after losing the opener to USC — a loss that’s grown increasingly ugly as the Trojans falter — but has now dropped a pair of SEC games in recent weeks and got outclassed entirely on Saturday.

So while the Tigers might’ve bested the Gamecocks on Sept. 14, both teams have played themselves into different spots with weeks left in the season, and the committee ranked them as such, even at the expense of seemingly ignoring a head-to-head result.

“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,” Manuel said.