Time for USC to accept mediocrity
With Carolina’s second loss in as many weeks to yet another team it could have beaten, it’s time to look at the Gamecock football program and call it like it is — USC just isn’t as good as the best in the SEC. In 17 years, Carolina can’t do it. The program’s all-time winning percentage has hovered around 50 percent for years. The Gamecocks have only one 10-win season, one conference championship and didn’t win a bowl game until the ’90s.
And, good lord, Columbia has become the place where successful coaches realize they just can’t do it anymore. Not here, anyway. The first man to follow his hubris was Paul Dietzel, who won a national championship at LSU, and did a fairly decent job at Army. In eight years at Carolina, he went 42-53-1. There were only three winning seasons and one bowl game, a loss to West Virginia in the Peach Bowl. The money quote from Wikipedia: “Dietzel had become unpopular due to his team’s continued mediocrity and failure to realize the lofty dreams that he had promised.” Sound familiar?
The second national championship-winning coach was Lou Holtz, who took over much to the delight of the USC faithful. We cast a jaundiced eye on the whole affair because you shouldn’t be too happy about a new coach who hasn’t been on the sideline yet. Carolina promptly went 0-11, before two OK seasons and two bowl wins. After that, late-season failures became the norm until Holtz left and was replaced by yet another championship coach, Steve Spurrier. Sweet Lou went 33-37.
Oh, Stevie. You came for the golf, you stayed for the mind-numbing frustration. Through the weekend, Spurrier is sitting on a 34-26 mark, by far the most successful consecutive run of Gamecock football, ever. How sad is it that averaging a barely-winning season is considered the best period ever in the history of the program? It’s time to pull the plug on hopes of USC doing any better. Get the doctors to call it — this team will never be very good.
When Spurrier took the job at Carolina, ESPN’s Lee Corso said what I did at the time, that Spurrier would never win a conference championship at USC. Naturally, the Gamecock fanbase lost its collective shit, without recognizing the truth in what Corso was saying. While the Palmetto State has a ton of football talent, it’s been mined by outside powers for decades. You can’t recruit well enough at this school. If you’re good enough to play in the SEC, why do you want to play for a team that has never been to the championship game? Tradition matters. A winning tradition matters more. It’s why even horrible coaches at Alabama (Ray Perkins, Mike DuBose, Mike Shula) had a 10-win season by their third year in.
Face it — Carolina is no different than Kentucky. The Gamecocks can overperform at times, but they’re not going to challenge for the division title. An upset here, and upset there, but each year when the curtain drops on the regular season, if USC makes the six-win plateau, it’s going to a lower-tier bowl to meet the best the C-USA has to offer (or Big East, or Big Ten, or Big XII). This year, 6-7 looks very likely, with the last loss coming at Birmingham’s Legion Field in, God help us, the Papajohns.com Bowl in front of about 20,000 people in the freezing cold in December.
At least the game will be in the daytime. You don’t want to be in that part of the Magic City at night. Watching your team lose to a bad Big East team will suck a lot more when you get shot leaving the stadium.
