This is getting to be a thing, to use the peculiar phrase.
For two straight seasons, the South Carolina Gamecocks have misled the nation by providing an aberrational season-opening result, followed by a result against Georgia which did not fit with the rest of the SEC season.
South Carolina offers lasting proof that September is a very fragile month, one in which broad and sweeping conclusions — while perfectly understandable — must be made with an allowance for their potentially fleeting quality.
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It is part of the fun of being a college football fan and, yes, a pundit. My college football writing career began back in 2001, and in 2002, I unveiled a column at my previous employer called the “Weekly Affirmation.” It enjoyed a very good run — more than a decade is pretty good for a coaching tenure.
The idea of the “Weekly Affirmation” came from a more specific column, my week-one column every year, something I’ve carried to The Student Section. Here’s this year’s version.
College football involves no preseason games. Until the first kickoff at the start of September (or the very end of August), it’s all speculation. That river of opinion and bluster from me and other writers through July and August is just dart-throwing while blindfolded.
Sure, some guesses are more educated than others. Of course Steve Sarkisian was going to fail at USC. Of course Arkansas was not ready for prime time. Of course Miami wasn’t going to save Al Golden’s job. However, for every easy call, there are situations you completely misread.
I had Auburn and Georgia Tech making the College Football Playoff. Not one — both.
The fun, though, lies in making calls about the season after that one game. I took that concept to create the “week-one reaffirmation, revision, or rebuttal,” a column in which I reacted in various ways to the opening games for various teams throughout the FBS. That was the source of the Weekly Affirmation. It lives on, 13 years after it began.
It’s mutually known, understood and accepted that one game is not a large-enough sample size on which to fully base an opinion; hence, the emphasis on fun. This is enjoyable; the work lies in explaining why a season did or didn’t pan out. That’s when careless knee-jerk statements and vague word salads reflect poorly on me and my fellow pigskin pundits. The speculation is the fun part, and as long as I or any colleague refrain from attaching significance to a given bit of speculation, it shouldn’t be a big deal whether our opinions are right or wrong.
With that explanation out of the way, let’s get back to South Carolina, a team which has definitely thrown curveballs based on its week-one results (and more) over the past two seasons.
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In 2014, South Carolina’s loss to Texas A&M led people to emphasize how ready the Aggies were to do big things under Kevin Sumlin. The Gamecocks were certainly exposed, but the majority opinion after that lid-lifter 14.5 months ago was that it said more about the winner’s potential power than the loser’s potential crisis. When Texas A&M’s season abruptly went south in October, everyone’s view of that game changed. Moreover, when South Carolina rebounded to beat Georgia in September of 2014, it became reasonable to think that the Gamecocks were going to be all right in the SEC East. Then, however, they began their remarkable run of blowing leads of 13 or more points in the fourth quarter. (They were the 2015 Seattle Seahawks a year before the fact.) The squandering of a 20-7 fourth-quarter lead to Gary Pinkel and Missouri served as the gateway for the Tigers to successfully defend their East crown. It also marked the departure of Steve Spurrier’s last best shot at the East and, by extension, the SEC title.
South Carolina, in game one and the Georgia game from 2014, threw pundits a few sharp knee-buckling breaking pitches for called strikeouts.
Improbably but genuinely, the same thing has happened in 2015.
The week-one win over North Carolina — far more than Stanford-Northwestern (since the Wildcats have remained solid and the Cardinal stumbled against Oregon) — is the most aberrational individual result of the season. It’s not even that South Carolina won which is the aberrational part; it’s that the Gamecocks won with their defense. That same defense made Florida look semi-competent this past Saturday. It breathed life into Texas A&M’s faltering offense a few weeks ago. It enabled Kentucky to score 26 points, a veritable feast for Big Blue.
Last but not least, that Georgia game, once again, caused a lot of us to think thoughts which were not borne out by the remainder of the season.
South Carolina’s “EFENSE” (defense without the D) was so, uhhh, pronounced Between the Hedges that Greyson Lambert appeared to be the bee’s knees. In the fullness of time, we were able to see that Gamecocks-Bulldogs 2015 was more the result of what South Carolina lacked than what Georgia owned. Against functioning defenses, Georgia hasn’t been able to display much of a pulse.
The story is the same on a general level, even if the specifics of the 2014 and 2015 seasons were different on a granular level: South Carolina, in week one and shortly later against Georgia, led lots of college football observers in the wrong direction. The Gamecocks remind us that first-month observations shouldn’t be clung to with more forcefulness and intensity than they deserve.
