The next South Carolina football coach will be both blessed and cursed with one of the most rabid fan bases in American sports.
A non-COVID home game for the Gamecocks in Williams-Brice Stadium is a state fair every Saturday — a beautiful mess of traffic, tailgating and great expectations.
For the new coach — and I think South Carolina should hire either Louisiana's Billy Napier or Coastal Carolina's Jamey Chadwell for the job — those great expectations will be the tough part.
"To think you're going to be Clemson — or beat Clemson — in the next five years would be crazy," said Ryan McGee, a senior writer at ESPN and one of the foremost authorities on college football in the South. "If you're South Carolina and you're going back to the Outback Bowl on a regular basis, that's pretty good."
But Gamecock fans don't want to hear that. They pine for the glory days of Steve Spurrier, when the Gamecocks beat Clemson five years in a row from 2009-13. They often conveniently forget about how Spurrier left the Gamecocks in the lurch when he quit midway through the 2015 season.
Any Gamecock glory days seem a long way off at the moment. Although Will Muschamp is walking out the door, having gotten fired Sunday night, George Rogers is not walking back in. Hated in-state rival Clemson, in the meantime, contends for the national championship every year and can get almost any 4- to 5-star recruit it wants.
