COLUMBIA — It wasn’t difficult to find orange in the capital city on Tuesday, even blocks from Clemson’s biggest rival.
Two cars, both with Tiger paw flags firmly affixed to each side, parked on Assembly Street in front of the Richland County Public Library. Two women wearing matching Clemson sweatshirts walking down Lady Street in the Vista. A man in a purple T-shirt bearing a white paw standing in front of a sushi restaurant, within sight of the University of South Carolina’s Koger Center for the Arts.
Welcome to The Day After in Columbia, where Clemson fans wore their colors proudly, and South Carolina fans — well, they seemed to keep a low profile. To many Gamecocks supporters, Clemson beating Alabama to win the program’s second national football championship stung every bit as badly as that 56-7 drilling of USC in late November in Death Valley. Let's just say complaints about pick plays were very popular on local sports-talk radio.
Only Tuscaloosa, Ala., may have been more subdued Tuesday than Columbia, where a Clemson flag flew atop the state house, and the mild progress of South Carolina’s 6-7 season was dwarfed by the accomplishments of what former Gamecocks coach Steve Spurrier playfully called That Pickens County School. And surely the measuring sticks were out, trying to gauge where USC stood in relation to Clemson, and how long it might take the Gamecocks to close the gap.
It’s a natural reaction, but an unfair one. It’s impossible to overstate how far South Carolina had fallen a year ago, when late-season competitive games against traditional SEC powers camouflaged a talent-depleted unit that lost to an FCS program. It’s one thing for a single walk-on like Hunter Renfrow to emerge as a star; it’s quite another to need a half-dozen or more of them to fill out an offense drained by shortcomings in recruiting and development. That’s how bad it was in 2015 at USC.
No wonder, then, USC disappointment on Tuesday was directed at more than Clemson. “I’m a little bitter today, to be honest with you,” a lifelong Gamecocks fan told Columbia’s leading sports-talk radio station, 107.5-FM. “And I’m a little bitter at Steve Spurrier.”
Understandably so, given USC’s No. 4 final ranking was just over three years ago, when the Palmetto State program that appeared closest to contending for a national title seemed to be the one in Columbia. The fall since has been dizzying. As bad as things were at Clemson when Dabo Swinney replaced Tommy Bowden in the middle of the 2008 campaign, that still wasn’t the bottom-out 2015 was at South Carolina.
Current Gamecocks head coach Will Muschamp did yeomanlike work doubling USC’s win total this past season. He appears to be assembling a nice recruiting class, making a priority out of what had been USC’s weakest link in the final years under Spurrier. He has the complete support of an administration that’s allowed him to steer the design of a $50 million operations center, which South Carolina hopes to break ground on early this year.
Those are all positives. In barely a year under Muschamp, the record has improved, the talent level has improved, the level of optimism has increased. And I would suspect, given the result of Nov. 26 and the dogged nature of the head coach, USC and its players and staff will find no shortage of motivation from images of Swinney and Deshaun Watson hoisting that tall, gold national championship trophy. At nearly 1 a.m. Tuesday, Muschamp sent his players a text containing two words: "Game on."
Tuesday, though, belonged to the purple and orange, even though USC chose the same day to release a list of 2016 football highlights — like 13 true freshmen seeing game action, and long snapper Drew Williams being named to a magazine’s All-American fourth team. USC head men’s basketball coach Frank Martin tweeted congratulations to the Tigers: “Winning a game is hard. Winning a championship is an amazing TEAM accomplishment.” USC point guard PJ Dozier added similar sentiments.
Women’s head basketball coach Dawn Staley said last week that a “small part” of her would be rooting for Clemson, and after the game added on Twitter: “Congrats Clemson. I know Gnation (referring to the Gamecocks fan base), but it's credit deserved.” Others felt similarly: “I’m just glad an in-state team brought the national championship home,” one self-professed USC fan told 107.5.
From members of the Gamecocks football program, though, things were quiet. “Today just another day,” defensive end Dante Sawyer tweeted. And the university’s social media manager seemed to sense the USC community needed a pick-me-up on the morning after Clemson’s national title.
“Here's a video of some cute puppies playing around on the Horseshoe in case you need to see it today,” USC tweeted. Yeah, it was that kind of day in Columbia.
Two cars, both with Tiger paw flags firmly affixed to each side, parked on Assembly Street in front of the Richland County Public Library. Two women wearing matching Clemson sweatshirts walking down Lady Street in the Vista. A man in a purple T-shirt bearing a white paw standing in front of a sushi restaurant, within sight of the University of South Carolina’s Koger Center for the Arts.
Welcome to The Day After in Columbia, where Clemson fans wore their colors proudly, and South Carolina fans — well, they seemed to keep a low profile. To many Gamecocks supporters, Clemson beating Alabama to win the program’s second national football championship stung every bit as badly as that 56-7 drilling of USC in late November in Death Valley. Let's just say complaints about pick plays were very popular on local sports-talk radio.
Only Tuscaloosa, Ala., may have been more subdued Tuesday than Columbia, where a Clemson flag flew atop the state house, and the mild progress of South Carolina’s 6-7 season was dwarfed by the accomplishments of what former Gamecocks coach Steve Spurrier playfully called That Pickens County School. And surely the measuring sticks were out, trying to gauge where USC stood in relation to Clemson, and how long it might take the Gamecocks to close the gap.
It’s a natural reaction, but an unfair one. It’s impossible to overstate how far South Carolina had fallen a year ago, when late-season competitive games against traditional SEC powers camouflaged a talent-depleted unit that lost to an FCS program. It’s one thing for a single walk-on like Hunter Renfrow to emerge as a star; it’s quite another to need a half-dozen or more of them to fill out an offense drained by shortcomings in recruiting and development. That’s how bad it was in 2015 at USC.
No wonder, then, USC disappointment on Tuesday was directed at more than Clemson. “I’m a little bitter today, to be honest with you,” a lifelong Gamecocks fan told Columbia’s leading sports-talk radio station, 107.5-FM. “And I’m a little bitter at Steve Spurrier.”
Understandably so, given USC’s No. 4 final ranking was just over three years ago, when the Palmetto State program that appeared closest to contending for a national title seemed to be the one in Columbia. The fall since has been dizzying. As bad as things were at Clemson when Dabo Swinney replaced Tommy Bowden in the middle of the 2008 campaign, that still wasn’t the bottom-out 2015 was at South Carolina.
Current Gamecocks head coach Will Muschamp did yeomanlike work doubling USC’s win total this past season. He appears to be assembling a nice recruiting class, making a priority out of what had been USC’s weakest link in the final years under Spurrier. He has the complete support of an administration that’s allowed him to steer the design of a $50 million operations center, which South Carolina hopes to break ground on early this year.
Those are all positives. In barely a year under Muschamp, the record has improved, the talent level has improved, the level of optimism has increased. And I would suspect, given the result of Nov. 26 and the dogged nature of the head coach, USC and its players and staff will find no shortage of motivation from images of Swinney and Deshaun Watson hoisting that tall, gold national championship trophy. At nearly 1 a.m. Tuesday, Muschamp sent his players a text containing two words: "Game on."
Tuesday, though, belonged to the purple and orange, even though USC chose the same day to release a list of 2016 football highlights — like 13 true freshmen seeing game action, and long snapper Drew Williams being named to a magazine’s All-American fourth team. USC head men’s basketball coach Frank Martin tweeted congratulations to the Tigers: “Winning a game is hard. Winning a championship is an amazing TEAM accomplishment.” USC point guard PJ Dozier added similar sentiments.
Women’s head basketball coach Dawn Staley said last week that a “small part” of her would be rooting for Clemson, and after the game added on Twitter: “Congrats Clemson. I know Gnation (referring to the Gamecocks fan base), but it's credit deserved.” Others felt similarly: “I’m just glad an in-state team brought the national championship home,” one self-professed USC fan told 107.5.
From members of the Gamecocks football program, though, things were quiet. “Today just another day,” defensive end Dante Sawyer tweeted. And the university’s social media manager seemed to sense the USC community needed a pick-me-up on the morning after Clemson’s national title.
“Here's a video of some cute puppies playing around on the Horseshoe in case you need to see it today,” USC tweeted. Yeah, it was that kind of day in Columbia.