Scott Davis: The team no one wants to play won’t be playing

Scott Davis has followed South Carolina athletics for over 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter year-round and a column during football season that’s published each Monday on GamecockCentral.com.

Following is this week’s Scott Davis newsletter. To receive it each Friday, sign up here.

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This isn’t going to be a rant.

Really, it’s not.

When you lose three times by mid-October, chances are overwhelmingly strong that you aren’t going to get a crack at winning a national championship in college football. That was true 30 years ago, it was true 15 years ago at the height of the BCS Era, and apparently, it’s true now.

I get it, man.

Even with the College Football Playoff opening its arms this year to 12 teams instead of the puny four they’d previously admitted, three losses are still three losses. And after retreating from Tuscaloosa on the wrong end of a devastating come-from-ahead 27-25 loss, South Carolina had tallied three losses after just six games this season. It’s hard to climb out of that foxhole.

At that moment, precisely none of us were contemplating the possibility we’d watch the Gamecocks play for a title this season. And as December dawned and the initial CFP rankings appeared, it became at last official: We would indeed not be watching such a thing.

In the end, everything wound up happening exactly like we thought it would two months ago. Nothing to see here, right?

Well…

In those intervening months, our Gamecocks reeled off six straight wins. They kept facing off against Top 25 teams, and they kept beating them. They won impressively (Texas A&M, Vandy), they won hard-fought heavyweight championship bouts (Missouri), and they won even when they occasionally struggled on both sides of the ball (Clemson… speaking of which, How ‘Bout Them ‘Cocks! Check out my column from the Clemson game here).

The common denominator in South Carolina’s November? Victories.

The other common denominator was that their schedule was more difficult than all but a handful of teams in these United States of America. Surely, the committee would recognize that South Carolina was one of the 12 best football teams in the country, wouldn’t they?

They may well have recognized it, but they didn’t reward it.

And that’s why so many of us are disappointed, despondent and even a little disgusted today.

Twelve teams will vie for a national championship. But the team that none of them wants to play will not be one of them.

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The Strength of Schedule Fallacy

It’s always been about strength of schedule in college athletics.

At least that’s what they’ve always told us, and what the college basketball selection committee always preached when piecing together the Field of 68 for the NCAA Tournament each year. South Carolina fans should know. Back during the Frank Martin years, the Gamecock men’s team finished third in the SEC, won 25 games, and still wound up on the outside looking in when the Tourney teams were announced.

The culprit? South Carolina’s weak strength of schedule.

Fans often disagreed with the basketball committee’s decisions – sometimes vehemently – but at least that group was consistent: They wanted the best teams in there and didn’t particularly care who they were or what their records were, and they had no interest in rewarding programs that stockpiled wins against lesser competition. If it meant leaving out teams from Power 5 conferences, so be it.

The College Football Playoff committee hasn’t officially filled out its bracket yet, but if its preliminary standings hold, then we can brace for a vicious backlash from a lot of angry fans of a lot of deserving programs – South Carolina among them.

South Carolina’s schedule was – depending on when you looked at it during the season – usually ranked somewhere between the fifth and 15th most difficult college football schedule in the game this season, and the Gamecocks went 9-3 against that schedule and won six straight to conclude the year. That last part should’ve helped them because the committee has also made noises in recent weeks about the importance of its teams “finishing strong.”

No one finished stronger than the Gamecocks.

Yet multiple non-strong finishers will conclude the year ahead of South Carolina, as will others whose strength of schedule ratings are nearing “Wait, Is This a High School Schedule?” territory (Boise State? Really?).

Meanwhile, almost every national analyst who follows the sport believes the Gamecocks are most definitely one of the 12 best teams in the country. And this was our first shot at a 12-team College Football Playoff?

Bad Teams Welcome!

Programs who hope to see themselves in the Playoff in the future have gotten an unintended message from the committee this year: Schedule bad teams.

The badder the better.

Shane Beamer acknowledged this week that he’d have to reconsider scheduling more difficult non-conference opponents like North Carolina and Virginia Tech in the future. “Clearly you can go through an entire season, not beat a ranked team and be in the Playoff if you just win,” Beamer said, adding, “The committee made it very clear that they really don’t give a hoot who you beat.”

They should give a hoot.

It should matter who you beat.

That’s precisely why college football enacted the BCS system way back in 1999. We were then relying on a ridiculous system that involved sportswriters picking the national champions based on whether one of 10 or 15 brand-name teams finished their season undefeated or not. The goal in changing things 25 years ago was to find out exactly who the best team in the country was – not to leave it up to a bunch of nerds typing on laptops.

Even with 12 teams in this year’s Playoff, we still may not actually find that out in 2024.

Because as crazy as this may sound to all those experts and numbers-crunchers who decided this year’s final CFP rankings, the best team in the country right now may be the one that is based in Columbia, South Carolina.

It would’ve been exciting to see the Gamecocks get an opportunity to prove that on the field. Instead, we’ll get to watch Ohio State and Alabama and Georgia and Notre Dame (and what the hell, maybe even Clemson) compete for the title…again.

Somebody get Kennesaw State and Ball State and East Tennessee State on the phone. We’ve got some schedule openings to fill.

Tell me how you’re feeling about the CFP’s disappointing rankings by writing me at [email protected].

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