Simulated Gameday Experience

Arkansas 33, South Carolina 16

Back off, South Florida: South Carolina’s owned the late-season swoon for years now, and you haven’t been a football program long enough to challenge for that title.  South Carolina’s record in the last six games of the season over the last four years:

-  2006: 3-3 (plus bowl win)

-  2007: 2-4 (plus bowl loss, all five losses in a row)

-  2008: 3-3 (plus bowl loss)

-  2009: 1-3 (incomplete)

Of those seasons, only 2006 would even count as a hot streak to close the year, so this team doesn’t do late season progress at all.  So it makes sense that they lost to Arkansas, although to be fair the final margin is deceiving – South Carolina didn’t get badly outplayed by Arkansas, at least on yardage.  But South Carolina did have more penalties, couldn’t hold onto a few passes, offered up the only turnover of the game, and tossed in a safety as a nice bonus.  That, coupled with a failed opportunity after starting a drive at Arkansas’s 43 yard line, more or less doomed the Gamecocks.

Really, though, this is part of a theme – South Carolina opens the season on fire (typically thanks to getting Vanderbilt early and some out-of-conference fun) and then the conference season sets in, losses start piling up, and the team starts trailing off before ending up somewhere between 6-6 and 8-4.  As these things go, it’s not bad, really; South Carolina is in a position a lot of other teams would love to be in, consistently around bowl games.

Still, for the rest of us it smells like stagnation, and I’m starting to think it smells like that to South Carolina fans as well.  It’s tough, and I think even South Carolina partisans aren’t sure that there’s a better way out yet.

Tags: weekly reflections