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USA Today Sports Media Group
Sport
Pete Fiutak

South Carolina Preview 2022: Season Prediction, Breakdown, Key Games, Players

South Carolina Gamecocks Preview 2022: Previewing, predicting, and looking ahead to the South Carolina season with what you need to know and keys to the season.


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South Carolina Gamecocks Preview
Head Coach: Shane Beamer, 7-6, 2nd year at South Carolina
2021 Preview: Overall: 7-6, Conference: 3-5
Offense, Defense Breakdown | Keys To The Season
Season Prediction, What Will Happen
South Carolina Top 10 Players
South Carolina Schedule & Analysis

South Carolina Gamecocks Preview 2022

You see that?

It’s one of the hardest things in sports to spot, but it you look off in the distance, way out there, you might be able to catch a quick glimpse.

It’s an SEC football fan base that actually appears to be sort of … happy? Without winning a national championship?

After going a combined 6-16 in two years before the breakthrough 2021, you can understand why the Gamecock base is excited. That’s what happens when you get a good season that no one saw coming.

These things are gone in a snap, and certainly South Carolina football fans are going to want a whole lot more out of head coach Shane Beamer – losing 30-0 to Clemson is never going to sit well – but there’s real, reasonable anticipation now for a program and team that should be dangerous.

There’s a theory that there’s no better time to be a sports fan of a team than when it’s just on the verge of being really good.

South Carolina is still building, and it’s not going to be easy with a nasty schedule that would bury most teams, but there’s a ton of experience, it has a good young head coach, and with the addition of Spencer Rattler, an argument could be made that no one outside of the Denver Broncos did more to upgrade a quarterback situation.

Is South Carolina going to beat Georgia? Almost certainly not, and it probably won’t beat Texas A&M or Clemson, either, but at least the team is good enough that an upset in any of those three games wouldn’t be insanely crazy – that’s a far cry from where the program was at last year at this time.

And that’s the next step. In 2021 it was the blowout win over Florida that came out of nowhere – along with the rocking of North Carolina in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl – and this year there needs to be another surprise or two considering how good this starting 22 should be.

SEC fan happy time goes away when the expectations start to become outsized, and that’s coming for South Carolina soon enough.

But for right now, the fan base has a team to get jacked about for the next several months.

Offense, Defense Breakdown | Keys To The Season
Season Prediction, What Will Happen
South Carolina Top 10 Players
South Carolina Schedule & Analysis

South Carolina Gamecocks Preview 2022: Offense, Defense NEXT

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