Yahoo Sports Shane Beamer makes his case for South Carolina to be in College Football Playoff
Way back in January, when the stink of a 5-7 season was still lingering on South Carolina, Shane Beamer held his first team meeting for the 2024 Gamecocks.
He made a comment about a bowl game at the end of the season, how South Carolina was going to get back to the postseason after missing it for the first time in Beamer’s tenure. Right after the meeting, five-star freshman edge rusher Dylan Stewart — who might have been on campus for 48 hours — walked up to his new coach with a declaration.
“Enough of this bowl stuff,” Beamer said Stewart told him. “We have higher expectations that that.”
On Saturday afternoon in the bowels of Memorial Stadium, Beamer sat behind the podium after South Carolina’s 17-14 win over No. 12 Clemson, having earned the chance to make his case for the Gamecocks as a College Football Playoff team.
“I do believe we deserve a spot in the 12-team playoff,” Beamer said. “I get it, the committee has a really tough job. They have to choose the 12 best teams. I get it, we’ve got three losses.
“When you look at our strength of schedule (No. 15 in FBS), our wins on the road (4-1) in tough environments,” he continued, “we aren’t playing in front of 20,000 people like some teams do. We go into hostile environments every single week. Our only loss on the road is a two-point loss” at Alabama.
The No. 15 Gamecocks (9-3) went into Saturday in the playoff picture but, per ESPN’s Playoff Predictor, had just a 58% chance of making the 12-team field with a win over Clemson (9-3). But then they actually beat the Tigers, defeating another ranked team to finish the season on a six-game winning streak.
If the playoff is about finding the true top dozen teams, Beamer argued, how could South Carolina be left out?
“If the committee’s job is to pick the 12 best teams,” Beamer said, “you tell me on selection Sunday, if South Carolina pops up in that bracket, I don’t know anyone that would be excited about playing this team the way we’re playing. That is what I judge it on.”
Whether or not it will be a part of the selection committee’s decision when they choose the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff field next Sunday, Beamer made a pretty convincing point. To look across college football is to see a bunch of mercurial teams.
On Friday, Georgia needed eight overtimes to beat a 7-5 Georgia Tech team. Just as the Clemson-South Carolina game went final, Michigan (7-5) knocked off No. 2 Ohio State. And that all comes just a week after six teams ranked in the Top 16 lost.
Yet, South Carolina just keeps winning.
The Gamecocks have not faltered since Oct. 12. While they do have three blemishes on their record — losses to LSU, Ole Miss and Alabama — there’s no truly ugly loss.
“I don’t know if there is a hotter team in America than what we are,” Beamer said. “Six wins in a row, four over ranked opponents, on the road for two of them. Outside of the Alabama loss, this was the first close road game we had all season.
“We are hot,” he added. “You want to be a team that is playing their best football at the end of the season. We sure are.”
When is the next College Football Playoff rankings release?
The next College Football Playoff show and Top 25 release is 7 p.m. Tuesday on ESPN.
The final CFP selections and playoff bracket will be revealed at noon next Sunday, Dec. 8.
