South Carolina Gamecocks now know what they will face in the first season of new coach Shane Beamer, with the SEC league office announcing this fall’s football schedule on Wednesday afternoon.
After two consecutive out-of-conference games to open the season – including a surprising trip to East Carolina – the SEC game begins the following week in Georgia, then continues in Week 4 against Kentucky. South Carolina has a chance to catch its breath against Troy before diving into a list of three games featuring Tennessee, Vanderbilt and Texas A&M – but the most challenging stretch will come after the goodbye week, when the Gamecocks must face Florida, Missouri, Auburn and then Clemson.
My initial lessons …
- I’ll repeat: I don’t really care about the trip to East Carolina. I know that the ECU’s status as a giant hunter has fallen over the past few seasons, but this is still a historically dangerous program and Gamecocks are in full rebuild. I know the powerful might not have known all of that at the time, but why was a trip to Greenville arranged in the first place?
- Eastern Illinois – quite random! But for now, at least, I’d love to see Gamecocks take a page from the NC State book and load up their non-conference with teams like the EIU. With Clemson as the USC’s annual rival, she already has a great OOC opponent, and SEC programming speaks for itself. Gamecocks simply don’t need to make things more difficult for this program than they should be. South Carolina won’t be in the playoffs anytime soon and doesn’t have to worry about the strength of the schedule, so in addition to giving fans something interesting to watch, there’s simply no point in having glamorous (and dangerous) OOC fights.
- It is hard to say that a week of goodbye is worthless, but it seems very inopportune coming before the Florida-Missouri-Auburn-Clemson stretch for the end of the season. Damn it.
- Also unfortunate is the placement of the Troy game in week 5. Usually, this final OOC showdown would be reserved for the week before the Clemson game, serving as a de facto bye in the week and a chance to rest and recover from the SEC schedule before facing the great game of rivalry. Instead, the Gamecocks will end things with Auburn (which must be a game with many stories in it, given that half of South Carolina’s technical team is now on the plains).
Overall, I’m not sure how I feel about this schedule and its feasibility for success in Beamer’s first year. What do you think?