The Verdict: The good outweighed the bad, except on the scoreboard

South Carolina football superfan Chris Paschal writes a weekly column during the season for GamecockCentral called “The Verdict.” Chris is a lawyer at Goings Law Firm in Columbia.

I have never seen Williams-Brice like that.

I woke up a little after 6 AM, picked up my phone, pulled up Twitter, and was absolutely shocked at what I saw. Students had lined Bluff Road starting at midnight (maybe even sooner) and were chomping at the bit to get into Gamecock Park. At that moment, I realized this was going to be a special day.

And even in defeat, it was a great day. The University of South Carolina, the city of Columbia, and everything that entails Gamecock Football were all center stage for the first time in probably close to a decade. And we rose to the occasion.

Gameday could not have been more of a showcase for what we do and who we are than it was on Saturday. Pat McAfee, one of the more polarizing personalities in sports media, absolutely endeared himself to the Gamecock faithful with how excited he was to be in Columbia. Darius Rucker performed a few of his hits. Nick Saban was smiling and laughing. Dawn Staley had to do everything in her power not to join in one of the loudest “GAME-COCKS” chants I have ever heard. 

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Then there was the game itself. What an incredible start. The crowd was unhinged. The defense was flying around. And our offense – yes, our offense – was humming in the first half. Recruits were blown away, Kirk Herbstreit and Chris Fowler could not have been more complimentary of our fanbase, and things finally looked like they were clicking. 

Until they weren’t.

Chris, Wes, Mike, Jack, and the entire Gamecock Central staff touched on some of the things that did not go our way. In my opinion, something that went awry that Carolina could control was the tackling. In the second half, our tackling really started to fail the defense, something that absolutely needs to be addressed before we play even more talented offenses like OIe Miss and Alabama.

For a defense as fast and deep as Carolina’s, I was surprised that we really struggled to wrap up and get the ball carrier to the ground in the third and fourth quarter. I’m not sure if we were tired, lost confidence, or if LSU simply was that untouchable in the second half (I have my doubts on that), but whatever the issue was needs to be fixed before it gets amplified in October. 

That being said, Saturday was a really encouraging day for the Gamecock football program. For years, LSU has been the barometer when it comes to what a SEC roster should look like. Even if they weren’t winning National Titles, LSU always had better players and better athletes than their opponents (or at the very least the same caliber of athletes as Florida in the 2000’s and Alabama in the 2010’s). I’m not sure if that is still true in 2024 under Brian Kelly, but if they have slipped, it isn’t by much. 

What we learned on Saturday is Carolina has just as many athletes as LSU. As reported by Gamecock Central throughout the summer, and as I heard throughout August, this is the best roster Shane Beamer has had in Columbia. And it showed on Saturday. We could run with LSU, we could pass rush against LSU, we could defend LSU, and we could score on LSU. If Carolina can match up athlete for athlete with LSU, then there are not many rosters we will face that will have more athletes than the Gamecocks. 

What we also learned on Saturday is Carolina expects to win big-time games against big-time opponents. I said last week that the LSU was not a big moment for the program because nobody expected Carolina to win. And while it turned out that a few pundits did end up picking Carolina (again, shoutout to Pat McAfee), it was really only the glass-half-full Gamecock fans and the guys in our locker room who believed we could win. And they did not back down from the fight, and in fact took the fight to LSU for most of that game. 

[Win two tickets to the South Carolina-Akron football game]

Yet despite us learning a lot of good about our football team, I was actually worried leaving the stadium that this type of loss would kill team morale. I was worried that this loss would be a hangover that the team couldn’t shake for weeks or maybe even for the rest of the season. We were that close to clinching a program-defining win. We were that close to catapulting our program into the next stratosphere. And then Lucy pulled the football out from under us. “How can we come back from this,” I thought sitting in traffic outside of Williams-Brice Stadium. 

From everything I have heard the past few days, we will most certainly bounce back from this. Morale is not dead in the locker room. There is no hangover. And from what I have been told, this team is even more hungry and even more dialed in.

You never want to lose a football game the way Carolina lost that football game. But it sounds like they are embracing the good to come from the weekend and fixing the bad. Despite the final score, more good happened in Columbia this past weekend than bad. This team and this staff in many ways were vindicated in how they are building this program and in how good this 2024 team can be. And that was in a loss. 

While that daunting October slate of Ole Miss, at Alabama, and at Oklahoma awaits us, I expect this team to come out and dominate Akron this Saturday. And I expect them to wrap up the ball carrier when tackling. 

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