Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Gamecocks is brought to you by the Mason Jar, New York City. The Mason Jar is the official gamecock bar for the New York City area. Fans and alumni of USC can come by the Jar for some great barbecue, cold drinks, and of course, to watch the gamecocks in any sport, all while surrounded by South Carolina memorabilia. If you want to get a slice of game day in Columbia, all while in the Big Apple, head to The Mason Jar on east 30th street. All right, here we go to episode 199 of Cox Talking Gamecocks, brought to you by The Mason Jar, New York City. I am your host, Tim Cox, where I will keep every episode from 18 one to 2001. And I'm sad. I'm sad, y'all, I'm sure just like many of us out there, I am hurting. Hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving and I hope you guys got your laughs and your smiles and your joy in then, because Saturday absolutely sucked a lot of the life out of us and a lot of game cognition. And we're sitting in a spot now where it just is really sad and downtrodden and you look back and there's a lot of woulda, coulda, shoulda. So what I'm going to do this episode is going to turn it around a little bit. We're going to rip the bandaid off, I'm going to talk about the Clemson game, and then I'll get into just a couple of quick updates from both basketball teams. And now that unfortunately football is officially done, I will start focusing more on the nitty gritty minute details crows to the game and things like that for basketball moving forward. That'll really start next episode as both teams will be back in action after the holiday break. So, yeah, let's jump right into this thing where the South Carolina Gamecocks have ended their season at five and seven after dropping a game to Clemson, the last game of the year, 16 to seven.
[00:02:47] And I don't really know where to begin with this one. I'll be honest with you all. Normally I sit down, collect my thoughts, jot a couple of things down. This one, we're just going off raw emotion here, just raw gut here, because I don't want to sit down and think about this one. You had the gamecocks on a three game win streak, one game away from eligibility, bowl game eligibility, excuse me. You're at home, you're at night, you sort of felt like this could be the moment. Senior night, last game for Leguette, last game for Rattler, last game for Joyner, amongst many others.
[00:03:29] And it sort of is a summary of the season.
[00:03:36] And what I mean by that is, all year you looked at it on paper, the team, and you said, yeah, we should be pretty good, and you looked at some of the opponents and the matchups and you said we should handle that. And you come up just short or something just doesn't click fully. And even looking back to the first game where you felt like you matched up pretty well against the UNC defense, you look at the Florida game, which ended up being really the Achilles heel of this entire season, but the gamecocks. Being so close within one score or ten points, being so close for basically the entire game. I mean, it was like a big Ten West game. It was a field position battle. Offenses couldn't do anything. To be so tantalizingly close for 2 hours, basically. And then to come up just short is just heartbreaking and it's the nature of it and how you lose to your rival in that sense when you needed to get that win for bowl eligibility. Williams bryce was absolutely packed to the gills. You saw very little orange in that stadium. You had every reason that you could come out and win this game and things just did not break our way. There were mental errors, there were bad mistakes that ended up biting in the ass.
[00:05:07] I mean, it just really is those couple of plays. And how many times have we said that this year where you have a couple of plays and it could be the totally different outcome of the mean right now. So you're sitting at five wins. Shane Beamer has missed a bowl game in his third year. I understand in those first two years you exceeded the expectations, you exceeded the win totals as set by Vegas, but you would have liked to have still thought that in year three you could have a little bit more of a base where getting six wins shouldn't have been a problem. And I like beamer. I think he's the man for the job. I think he wants to succeed more than anybody else. But in my you, you get one strike. You get one strike where you miss a bowl game at a school like University of South Carolina where football is a priority. We put resources into it. You're in the SEC, we want to win. We have won here. So the next couple of months are going to be critical for Beamer to go ahead and continue to build some of this momentum that he had going into this season. But seemingly it didn't really pan out. So he needs to regroup. The whole staff needs to regroup. It's going to be interesting to see what he does if he makes any changes on the staff, but hopefully we can look back at this year as sort of an aberration. But there is no postseason play for the gamecocks this year and especially for a guy, guys who are going to need to play a lot next year in critical roles. Allah, Lenora Sellers not getting this next month or so of practice is critical. That's why these coaches like the bowl games, even if they're the crappier ones. So you get that extra time of practice, but yeah. So that's where the gamecocks are at.
[00:07:04] It needs to be a situation where this is truly sort of the gap where there maybe was a rebuild. This is that year. Okay, fine. You have to move on from this, and it's going to sting for a long time. This is a really tough way to end the season, and going into an offseason without postseason play just really, really stinks and leaves a terrible taste in your mouth here. So let's get into what I liked and what I didn't like from the game. Here again, we're just doing this off of feel here. Starting with the defense, I mean, what I liked, you didn't give up the offensive score. You kept the Clemson offense out of the end zone for the entire game. And what has happened these last few games for the gamecocks, defensively has been great. You got to give Clayton White credit for making that adjustment because seemingly that was what needed to be done and it worked. It's a shame that it took so long in the season to make that change, because who knows where we would be now. But overall, I mean, you really liked what you saw from the know. You had the interception, Nick E in the end zone, shout out to him, O'Donnell Fortune almost got that other, you know, would have obviously kept points off the board, but not like the offense did anything anyway. But I felt that their pass rush was just disruptive enough, but I liked more. So the past defense, what the guys did in the secondary, they did not let anything come easy for Klubnik. And I think between the past defense excuse me, and the turnovers, those are two things that you really like out of this game. I didn't like how they were able to run the ball on us. The run defense was once again a little bit suspect, I think, when you look at the yards. Yeah, you had Shipley at 80 and Mafia at 89. So they had a good day combined between two of them. Kubnick was able to scramble and convert on some pretty big third and mediums third and longs, and it was just a situation where you felt like you knew what Clemson was going to do. They were not going to let Klubnik throw the ball too much. They didn't trust him. They felt like he can make a mistake. He did make a mistake. And whenever it was a critical third down, just key in on Shipley or Mafa, one of those two guys is going to get the ball and they're going to make a play. And it was frustrating to watch because you almost knew what was going to happen and how you don't double or triple Shipley in particular, I don't know. So that's something that you definitely don't like. That's definitely frustrating to see. But overall, defensively, I think it was a very good effort, just like the Kentucky game. The reason that this team was in it is because of the defense going out there time and time again and getting stops and keeping the opponent out of the end zone. I mean, if you had said going into this game that we're going to hold Clemson to 16 points, right, regardless of how they got those 16, you absolutely would have said yes to that. Sorry if there's a little noise in the background, I am traveling, but hopefully it's not too bad for you all. So overall, defensively, you are happy with the effort. Looking at the offense now, what I liked, I mean, you got in the end zone, you scored seven points, especially two years ago, where you were not able to do that. That was something you wanted to see. You scored early in the game, which is something that you felt was going to be critical to keep the crowd into the game and everything like that. You certainly like that, but I mean, really y'all, there's not much else to say good about the offensive showing. Spencer had 112 yards with the pick, Mario Anderson, who shout out him, that guy's a warrior. But I do not think he was 100% at all after taking that big hit, seemingly looked a little dazed. So I don't think after that hit he was really fully in the best mental state to make some plays. He finished with 35 yards. Rattler was the next guy behind him with 16. Leguette, he had a pretty good day. He had his six catches for 68 yards. Nobody else really did anything behind him, but it was just the inability to move the ball into the critical positions to get some points. And similar to the Kentucky game, it was this large gap of time in the game where they just couldn't get anything going. Spencer did not have time to get settled. Even when he did, some of the guys are making drops.
[00:11:36] The offense just seemed out of whack and it seemed out of sync. And you knew going into this game that the team was going to go as Spencer and Leguette did. While X did finish with a little decent stat line there in the middle two quarters of the game, really you didn't see a whole heck of a lot of him and they tried to feature him early, but I think Clemson did a good job of double teaming and triple teaming him. And after that, there really wasn't anybody you could count on consistently. A couple guys had drops, a couple guys just weren't in position to make plays. The AB catch was just out of bounds. That was a tough one. So this was a very poor offensive showing. And when you think of the last couple of know you're going against Kentucky and now Clemson, and the offense was stymied for the vast majority of those games. You have to look at Dawah Loggins and think know, how can he improve his game planning, how can he improve his play calling, what needs to be corrected going into this season and what needs to be reevaluated on the offensive side of the ball. Right. All year you were able to kind of have this nice downfield passing attack that kind of went away the last two games. It certainly went away on Saturday against Clemson. And what are you going to do next year when you don't have a veteran quarterback under center, no matter who it is? Right. Even if it's Luke or if it's Lenores, these guys haven't played a whole heck of a lot of football at the collegiate level with the rushing attack. How can we get some more consistency from there? If you have Mario Anderson back, that's great, I like him. Is DJ. Brazil going to develop well? Do you get a recruit coming in who could be an impact freshman? Do you have someone in the transfer portal that you're targeting? Maybe it's Juju McDowell also has a nice more featured role next year. So the point that I'm trying to make is the offense. These last two games against legitimate good defenses was absolutely stymied and they looked lost. The pass protection was all out of sorts. Spencer did not have time, spencer looked rushed, and if X was not able to make a play, the offense was not able to go. And yes, I understand you have to go to your star player, but you have to be able to account for the fact that he may not get it going on a given night. So that needs to be corrected in Dawah Loggins second year, and we're not going to jump up and down here and say he's not the right OC. It is his first year, but these last two showings against good defenses and even earlier in the year, like, there are maybe cause for pause, right? But overall, this game was lost pretty much because of the offensive, know, gifting Clemson those seven points early in the game with the backwards pass that was dropped, that was tough, right? That's a foot here and there and it's an incomplete pass. But to gift them seven points because of an offensive turnover, then to turn it right back over the other time in next possession, and that ultimately being the big difference. Like, yes, that isn't the final spread, how it ended, but it totally changed the dynamic of the game. And even if Carolina is able to go out and move the chains and have a normal punt and pin Clemson deep and not give them those quick seven points, it's a different ballgame.
[00:15:11] Aside from that, there were just things that just didn't go Carolina's way. Like the Clemson kicker, he was booty cheeks for the majority of the year. And of course he comes in and he hits everything and he hits them from far. It's just little things like that were just tough and the back to back false start penalties late in the game, that first one seemed like it was a bit of a phantom call that threw everything off and it was just every time there was a semblance of a rhythm, something went bad. Either it was a bad drop or it was a penalty. It was these little mistakes that added up and there was just not a lot of room for error. And the guys just picked a heck of a night to just come out a little flat, especially offensively. So I'm not going to dive in right now to everything about the season. I think I'll speak a few minutes on it next episode. But that is a tough, tough way to end your season for this football team and it's really tough because you look forward to it all year and to have that be the last game and not have a bowl game to look forward to really stinks. And there has been a lot of optimism and energy around our program, but right now it's just been sucked out of us. So you got to believe that this staff and Beamer specifically are going to look at everything from the top down about this program and say, how the heck did we get here? Like, how did we get to the point where we had to sweep an entire month to get to bowl eligibility? What went wrong earlier in the know? How did we let that Florida game bite us in the ass so bad? So hopefully when we're already talking about next year, hopefully next season, these guys have a bit more of a, I don't know, complete game plan. I don't even know what to say. I just cannot believe that we're sitting here sitting at five wins, not in a bowl game. And like I said, I think you get one shot to miss that and if you do it again, then there are serious question marks about everyone in that building. So really crappy way to end the year. Like I said, I'll probably put a punctuation on this next episode, but that is the Palmetto Bowl recap for you all here. Quick notes here about both basketball teams here. Last Friday, the women's basketball team beat Mississippi Valley State 101 to 19. Yes, I said that correct, 101 to 19. Too many people to count as far as highlights go.
[00:17:47] That's just a dominant performance against a school that's trying to establish themselves there. The women's next game is Thursday night against UNC little Border War. Here they are, number 18, Tar Heels are should be a good one for Don and company as they start another challenging opponent to start the year. They look to continue and stay unbeaten. The men play Tuesday night at Colonial life against Notre Dame. This is an exciting matchup. Ken Lamont Paris and crew continue their hot start. Excuse me. I'm very excited to dive into all of those recaps and dive in more into basketball season, especially now that we don't have anything to look forward to on the football front. So thank goodness for Lamont and Don Staley, especially starting off so strong there. But yeah, y'all, that wraps up this episode. It's a tough way to end the season. I don't think any of us pictured it going this way, especially at the start of the year. But again, hopefully with recruits continuing to come in and with seemingly, hopefully a little bit more backing behind the Nil front than we were a year ago, hopefully Coach Beamer can plug some of these holes via the portal and hopefully recruiting stays strong. And hopefully we're sitting here in a few months getting ready for next season and it all feels like a bad dream and we can correct some of these wrongs. But with that, y'all, please follow me on social media, Twitter or X is Cox gamecocks. Instagram is just the name of the show, cox Talking Gamecocks. And please, like subscribe and review the podcast. I appreciate all y'all. Go Cox.
