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Saturday night's SEC Network broadcast began with Taylor Zarzour fist-bumping Matt Stinchcomb and saying: "Are you ready for this?"
Play-by-play man and color analyst sat high above an electric Williams-Brice Stadium, and at least in their minds this had all the ingredients for an entertaining spectacle.
"It seems like a fair fight this year," Zarzour opened, "given the way the Gamecocks are playing currently and all the adversity that Clemson has faced this season."
Not long thereafter, both personalities were scrambling for their filler material. Later they would dine on Zesto's hamburgers on camera as Clemson's Thanksgiving-weekend chicken feast was already digesting.
Saturday night's rendition of the rivalry contained so little suspense and was settled so early that, here on Sunday afternoon, the natural reflex is to just quickly move on and talk about what's next for Clemson.
But it feels like doing so would cheapen what it took for this Clemson team to hold it all together and close the regular season with five straight victories, or what it took to squeeze the life out of the Gamecocks once again and this time to walk out of the place having dropped a zero bomb.
Coaches have long memories, and Dabo Swinney's is longer than most. If the guy can recall the name of some guy he met one time at a high school football game a few years ago, surely the memories of all that torment at the hands of Steve Spurrier and the Gamecocks are never going to be far from his mind during rivalry week.
He knows the feeling of his ascending program making major strides early in his tenure, and feeling like a lot of it was washed away by another loss to a program at the peak of its entire existence.
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He knows the disgust felt upon visiting high schools, trying to be a nice guy and stopping to pose for a picture, only to later see that it was Gamecock fans holding up five fingers.
In the midst of an unprecedented trend of suffering at the hands of the rival you're used to dominating, all sorts of theories get thrown around by fans who are actually saying it might be time to get rid of you because you can't beat the Gamecocks.
At some point from 2009 to 2013 a notion took root that the reason Clemson couldn't beat South Carolina was because Swinney thought other goals more important.
In 2014 they installed countdown clocks in the football offices to remind everyone of the importance of beating the Gamecocks. And surely in the aftermath of the streak-shedding domination that year, Swinney's last meeting with Spurrier, some chalked it up to Clemson's head coach finally placing the appropriate emphasis on the Palmetto Bowl.
Hogwash.
The reason Clemson turned this rivalry firmly back in its favor was the Tigers went from really good to great and the Gamecocks went from really good to really far off a cliff.
And now, when Shane Beamer can galvanize his team to the point of pulling off upsets of Auburn and Florida, the Gamecocks still are completely outclassed by a Clemson program suffering through a major dip in 2021.
The Tigers might be exceptionally down, but they are also exceptionally not out. So often this year it felt like 2010, when Clemson finished with a losing record and Swinney cleaned house on his offensive staff. Now it feels a lot more like 2014, when the Tigers began 1-2 but rode masterful late-season defense to crush the Gamecocks' souls and finish a trending-up 10-3.
For so long, South Carolina fans have played up their membership in the SEC as providing them access to a higher level of football that is superior to all those weaklings Clemson beats up on in the ACC.
And it's true that the SEC is the gold standard right now at the top: Georgia is the third different team from the conference in the last three seasons to enter the SEC title game 12-0 and ranked No. 1. You can hate the SEC and all its propaganda, hate Georgia and whoever else, and still recognize that feat as objectively remarkable and a testament to great football.
But just the same, you can objectively recognize as absurd any crowing done by the folks in Columbia about contributing anything at all to that greatness. The reality is they detract from it.
This year's team needed substantial good fortune to get out alive against East Carolina, Troy and Vanderbilt.
Two years ago Appalachian State won at Williams-Brice Stadium. Six years ago The Citadel did it.
As bad as the Will Muschamp era was, it could've been worse as the 2017 team beat Louisiana Tech by a point, and Muschamp's first team squeezed out narrow wins over UMass (34-28), East Carolina (20-15) and Vanderbilt (13-10).
South Carolina has also lost seven of its last eight meetings against Kentucky.
And about that ACC their fans love to ridicule? Last night's shellacking marked the Gamecocks' eighth loss against ACC competition in their last nine tries, as Muschamp lost to Virginia and North Carolina.
Now the ACC's fourth-best team, numerically at least, goes to Columbia and shows once again that all the SEC talk is just blather when it's coming from a program that's 24-42 in the conference since 2013.
In the final glimpse of glory under Spurrier, the Gamecocks finished that 2013 season with seven victories over teams that finished with winning records. Included were Clemson (11-2) and Wisconsin (9-4) in the final two games.
Since then, South Carolina is 14-42 against teams that had winning records.
No, you don't somehow acquire physical and mental toughness through association with a conference. You methodically build it from within, grow it and nurture it to the point that it stands strong even in the face of a down year.
Even in the face of what those SEC Network announcers thought was going to be a fair fight.
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