Column: South Carolina deserves to be in the College Football Playoff

South Carolina has done all it can to get to this point. Put your biases aside and look at this team for what it is: this is a College Football Playoff team.

Sitting on the floor of the Fail Room (the visitors’ locker room/press conference area) inside Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium on Oct. 12, this wasn’t a playoff team. South Carolina had just suffered a heart-breaking 27-25 loss to the Crimson Tide to move to 3-3 on the year.

In that moment, the team vowed they would get it right and rid themselves of that sick losing feeling. And they have done that. Since then, they’ve been one of the best teams in college football, winning their final six games to close out the regular season. Their final stamp on their resume was a thrilling 17-14 win over No. 12 Clemson on Saturday for their fourth road win of the year.

Even with the turnaround that the Gamecocks have had, it still may not be enough to crack the tournament. And that’s wrong if it ends up being that way. If the CFP aims to put the best teams in, then what are we talking about? If you have a set of working eyes, this is one of the 12 best teams.

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Now, it would seem the main argument against putting South Carolina in the playoff is those three losses. The Gamecocks lost to LSU, Ole Miss, and Alabama. Coincidentally enough, the Tide and Rebels are two of the other teams fighting for a potential at-large bid.

When deciding who’s in and who’s out, head-to-head will surely be considered. But if that’s your best argument, which it seems to be for many, that’s pretty lame. Also, it doesn’t seem to matter much to the committee since they put Alabama ahead of Tennessee after losing to them. They also put South Carolina over LSU at one point after the Gamecocks lost that matchup.

Even though Ole Miss and Alabama have the H2H edge, it shouldn’t be the deciding factor. After all, we cannot simply overlook the terrible losses on each of their schedules.

And it’s not just one bad loss — it’s two. While the Rebels have two wins over CFP Top 25 teams, they also lost to a 4-8 Kentucky team in Oxford. Even when it looked like they were back on track after beating Georgia, they lost to Florida in a game that saved Billy Napier’s job. The Gators managed to turn their season around and finish 7-5, but still, it’s a bad loss.

Much like Ole Miss, Alabama also beat Georgia back in September in one of the better matchups of the year. The week after that signature win? A 40-35 loss in Nashville to … the Vanderbilt Commodores. After winning four of their next five games, the Tide laid an egg in a 24-3 loss to Oklahoma. Mind you, both teams went 6-6 this season.

If we’re going to talk head-to-head, let’s also talk common opponents. South Carolina beat Kentucky 31-6 in Lexington. South Carolina beat Vanderbilt 28-7 in Nashville. South Carolina beat Oklahoma 35-9 in Norman. And the counterpoint to this will be, “But Alabama beat LSU 42-13 in Death Valley — at night!” Sure, that’s fair. But what “playoff team” loses to a 6-6 team that they were favored against by more than three touchdowns? And then gets beat by three touchdowns to a team that went 2-6 in their first year in the SEC? It’s the same deal for Ole Miss.

If we also want to rope Miami into this, the Hurricanes lost two of their final three games to unranked Georgia Tech and Syracuse to finish 10-2. Their best win came against a 9-3 Duke team. Their strength of schedule is ranked 55th. The fact that we have to mention Florida being one of their best wins tells you all you need to know.

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Let’s also talk some numbers. South Carolina has the 15th-best strength of schedule, 11th-best strength of record, three wins over CFP Top 25 teams and ranks ninth in game control. Alabama has the 17th-best strength of schedule, 10th-best strength of record, three wins over CFP Top 25 teams and ranks fifth in game control. This race could come down to these two teams. And they both seem to be about the same in these metrics.

When it comes down to it, though, South Carolina has had one bad game all year when it lost 27-3 to Ole Miss on Oct. 5. It’s also important to keep in mind the Gamecocks didn’t have LaNorris Sellers in the second half of a three-point loss to LSU. The precedent was already set last year when Florida State lost starting quarterback Jordan Travis to a season-ending injury.

So it’s up to the committee decide if Sellers going down with an injury in that game impacted the final outcome. And just in case you don’t think losing Sellers made a difference, South Carolina scored 24 points and put up 265 yards of offense in the first half with him in the game. When Robby Ashford took over for the second half, the offense only put up nine points with 133 yards. In a game where they lost by three points, there’s no denying the game would be different with a healthy Sellers.

South Carolina blew out Oklahoma and Vanderbilt on the road by 26 and 21 points, respectively. Alabama lost to both of these teams on the road. And more likely than not, the team that gets the last at-large bid will be going on the road for the first round later this month. The Gamecocks went 4-1 in away games this year with their only loss being that two-point game in Bryant-Denny. The Tide were 2-3 away from home.

The point is, the Gamecocks are going to be an extremely tough out for any higher-ranked team in the playoff. They’ve proven that all season long. They just capped off a perfect 5-0 month of November and don’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon, especially with Sellers, one of the best young stars in the game, at quarterback.

We can sit here and debate numbers all day long. But that was the point of the BCS format and having computers decide who the best teams were back in the day. This is why we have a playoff committee made up of 13 human beings. They decide who the best teams are. And if they’ve watched college football lately, they should see what we all see: South Carolina should be in the playoff.

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At the end of the day, it’s going to come down to big brand vs. most deserving. If the committee goes down the brand path like they did last year with Alabama and Florida State, it’ll be the Crimson Tide going to the playoff. If the committee uses their eyes and sticks to their values of putting the best teams in, South Carolina will be in.

None of this will really matter though if Clemson beats SMU in the ACC Championship on Saturday. As of right now, there will hypothetically be one open spot for the final bid in the playoff. That would only happen if SMU wins on Saturday. If not, that opens the door for the ACC to become a two-bid league and it would be hard to leave out the Mustangs and punish them for losing their conference title game.

It’s been a great season for the Gamecocks. From the horrors of going 5-7 in 2023 to being on the cusp of the playoff a year later, their turnaround is remarkable. Even if they get left out, they should be in line for a nice bowl game.

But if we’re being honest, this isn’t a hard decision. Let’s do the right thing and put South Carolina in the College Football Playoff.

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