Paul Finebaum weighs in on trajectory of Gamecock football program, Clemson rivalry

SEC Network host Paul Finebaum isn’t one to hold back, and he was posed a simple question this week on WJOX-FM’s The Roundtable.

Should South Carolina football be better in Year 4 under Will Muschamp?

The Gamecocks are coming off a 7-6 season that was by most measures disappointing. Following a 9-4 2017 season, the hype grew around USC, but the team was inconsistent, then injured and saw what looked like a soft schedule become one of the 10 or so most difficult.

Heading into 2019, much of the talk is a schedule with the top three teams in the land, one where eight wins might be a resounding success and a few slip-ups could mean no bowl game. That could mean something more rests on the 2020 seasons.

So the question stands should the Gamecocks be better than they’ve been?

“I think they should,” Finebaum said Monday. “I look at a couple games last year, the first one being Georgia. Expectations through the roof, being in Columbia that day. Gamecock fans talking trash then they got ran over. I’ll skip pas the Kentucky loss, and I think they were pretty lucky to beat Missouri, but they just laid such an egg in the bowl game and I know Virginia is pretty good, expected to win what ever stupid division that will get massacred by Clemson in the ACC Championship Game, but there’s no excuse for being scoreless and getting shutout 28-0 in a game an hour and a half from your campus.

“It sets up what I think is an interesting season, not a critical season, because South Carolina fans every time I try to talk about Will Muschamp underachieving, they tell me he’s on like the 8-year plan and they blame everything on Steve Spurrier.”

Finebaum was then asked about comparing the Nick Saban-Gus Malzahn dynamic to Muschamp and Dabo Swinney’s. Saban’s success has made Malzahn’s 53-27 record seem worse in comparison, while USC hasn’t broken through against the Tigers since 2013.

That reality clearly raises some hackles.

“The difference is that South Carolina, under that other guy, Steve Spurrier, who Carolina fans want to trash, had won five straight over Dabo Swinney,” Finebaum said. “We were talking about Clemsoning. The program was teetering. And now that Swinney is going for sixth straight, it has made the Gamecock Nation fraught with anger jealousy and pure hatred for Clemson. I’m faily close to that geographically, and it’s stunning to watch that and they can’t believe it.

“They’re hanging on to Will Muschamp because they see him as the hope. But if this season goes bust, next season goes do or die for him.”

This story was originally published July 1, 2019 at 5:08 PM.