What the College Football Playoff Predictor says on Sunday about South Carolina's chances
South Carolina did its part.
Once considered a long shot even to sniff the College Football Playoff conversation, the Gamecocks steadily improved their standing week by week, winning the regular season’s final six games to finish 9-3 overall and 5-3 in the SEC.
South Carolina, ranked No. 15 in last week’s CFP rankings, capped off its regular season with a 17-14 victory over No. 12 Clemson on Saturday afternoon in Clemson.
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ESPN.com’s College Football Playoff predictor has served as a broad guide — or just a fun exercise, depending on how you look at it — to what chances each team has had to make the 12-team field throughout the final part of the year.
And while the Gamecocks did their part, the predictor suggests that South Carolina didn’t get enough help from the teams around it to make the field.
As of Sunday afternoon, the predictor currently gives South Carolina a 21 percent chance of making the College Football Playoff.
Last week’s update said that a Gamecocks’ win over Clemson would jump Carolina into a coin-flip situation to make the field, but that did not happen due to the results of the other games.
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South Carolina does have one final potential saving grace — the human element.
There is a growing national media sentiment that South Carolina, arguably the hottest team in the country, has done enough to not only jump Clemson but also Alabama, Ole Miss, and Miami, which lost to Syracuse on Saturday.
And that human element, which includes the eyeball test and in theory a little common sense, means no computer can completely predict what the rankings will look like when they’re updated this week.
And for that reason, South Carolina will sit and wait for the College Football Playoff committee to release its latest rankings on Tuesday night at 7.
College Football Playoff Predictor Methodology
ESPN Analytics uses FPI to simulate the entire college football season 200,000 times. A committee model is applied to mimic College Football Playoff selections and seeding in order to generate a 12-team bracket for each simulation. The most likely CFP teams are provided for user selections. After user inputs, a likely bracket is generated and randomly simulated using FPI.
