‘We coming for blood’: South Carolina far from satisfied with 3-1 start going into bye week

Most would be happy to be in South Carolina’s position right now. Going into the bye week fresh off a 43-point win and two weeks to prep for a top 10 team coming into town.

With a 3-1 record, the Gamecocks are off to their best start to a season since 2017. The first month has typically been a struggle for any of Shane Beamer’s teams in Columbia. Over the first three years of his tenure, South Carolina was a combined 7-7 in September with two or more losses in each season by the first game of October.

But things have been different in 2024. This year’s group has continued to progress each week and made that four-point win over Old Dominion on Aug. 31 look like an ancient memory.

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Still, it hasn’t been good enough, not for South Carolina’s standards. As the team heads into its first bye week of the season, they feel they should be in a better spot.

“Content? No. I’m mad that we’re not 4-0 and that’s a whole another story that we’ll talk about at the end of the season,” Beamer said, right after a 50-7 win over Akron on Saturday.

Beamer isn’t entirely wrong to feel the way he does. It’s safe to say the entire program feels they shouldn’t have a loss on the record. But alas, they do, and it came in an excruciating way, losing 36-33 to LSU at home on Sept. 14.

In the days after that loss and leading up to the Akron game, the pain was still there. It was still being talked about constantly as if it just happened a few hours ago. Even after the win over the Zips, Beamer was still talking about the LSU loss. That’s how important that game was to South Carolina.

“When you put so much into something like that game last week, I mean, there’s a lot of disappointment — there’s no question about it,” Beamer said. “Certainly, Sunday was tough around our facility and Monday is an off-day and Tuesday, I’m not going to lie, we walked in the team meeting Tuesday at 8 a.m. and there were, I don’t want to say long faces, but you could still tell there was a lot of disappointment and realizing that there’s nothing you can do about that LSU game anymore.”

The key throughout the week, though, despite how often that loss was brought up, was to not let it linger. Meaning in terms of impacting their play on the field. And it certainly didn’t in a game where the Gamecocks dominated Akron for most of the night.

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After the bye week, things will pick up quite a bit for South Carolina. The 3-1 record looks great right now but it could change in a flash. The team will welcome in former Gamecock Juice Wells and Ole Miss on Oct. 5. They’ll then travel to Alabama and Oklahoma in consecutive weekends. Then comes another bye week to conclude gauntlet October.

For right now, the focus isn’t entirely on the next month and how tough things might get. It’s more so on improving off the Akron win and getting healthy during this “down time.”

“We’re not going to bring back the intensity, we’re going to pick it up. We’re halfway through but we don’t see the end,” Demetrius Knight said. “We’re just taking it one week at a time. Next week is crucial because we got to get key pieces back, but we also got to make sure we hold on to who we are and continue to keep being who we say we want to be.”

And make no mistake. While the team is off to a good start, the mentality hasn’t changed. Not one bit. They know some are still going to count them out, even with how they’ve been playing this season. That’s fine with them. Keep it coming.

“We pride ourselves on not paying attention to the outside noise, but we are well-aware that the vast majority of this nation counted us out before the season and that’s what we’re sticking to,” Juju McDowell said. “Yeah, we’re 3-1, we have ups, we have downs, but we coming for blood and that’s it.”

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