Ranked No. 21 in the first College Football Playoff poll on Tuesday, South Carolina will have to show considerable improvement against Texas A&M on Saturday afternoon in Columbia, S.C., in order to stay in the discussion for a championship.
The Gamecocks (5-3, 3-3 SEC) have been one of the league’s hottest teams, reeling off three straight wins after dropping their first three contests in conference play.
Two of those victories were against ranked teams but South Carolina’s most impressive result during its ongoing resurgence likely was its most recent victory — a 42-25 triumph at Oklahoma on Saturday.
“It’s not like if we’re ranked, not ranked — it’s not going to change anything that I do,” South Carolina coach Shane Beamer said Tuesday afternoon. “It’s not. It’s about us just continuing to get better. If our players don’t understand that every week is a new season, then they haven’t been paying attention to college football all year long.”
LaNorris Sellers passed for a season-high 301 yards and three touchdowns while adding 96 yards and two more scores on the ground versus the Sooners. South Carolina amassed 521 yards of total offense.
The Gamecocks also played lights-out defense, allowing Oklahoma just 71 yards in the first half and 359 overall, with most of those coming in mop-up time.
“We’ve got a big challenge on Saturday,” Beamer said. “We need to go into Saturday and be able to be better than what we were last week at Oklahoma.”
South Carolina will be without top running back Matt Fuller for the rest of the regular season after he suffered a broken bone in his lower left leg against the Sooners. Fuller leads the team’s running backs in carries (94), rushing yards (530) and touchdowns (five).
The Aggies (4-4, 1-4) head to Columbia off a bye week and after a 31-20 loss at then-No. 13 Alabama on Oct. 24.
Marcel Reed completed 14 of 21 passes for 163 yards with one TD and two interceptions for Texas A&M, which already has lost as many SEC games this year as it did the last two seasons combined.
Texas A&M had just 15 yards of offense in the fourth quarter as it surrendered two TDs. But the Aggies may have played their best overall game of the year in Tuscaloosa, prompting coach Mike Elko to take a handful of positives into the open week.
“I thought there were times in that Alabama game where we played football the way we would like to,” Elko said on Monday. “We didn’t finish the game, obviously, the way we wanted to. But I think some of the growth is there and there are signs that progress is being made. We’ve got to make it faster, more, bigger in order to get the results that we want.”
This is the 13th meeting between South Carolina and Texas A&M on the gridiron. The Aggies rallied from a 27-point deficit to post a 31-30 win at home last season.