Gamecocks hope to avoid letdown against Chanticleers
On the surface, No. 11 South Carolina’s meeting with Coastal Carolina looks like a break in the schedule between the end of SEC play and the annual battle with Clemson, but for a number of reasons, coach Steve Spurrier said he and his players have their eyes fixed straight ahead to Saturday’s game against the Chanticleers.
“Coastal’s a good team, well-coached,” Spurrier said. “We’ve got to go play well against those guys.”
Coastal Carolina is ranked No. 7 in the Football Championship Subdivision — one tier under the Football Bowl Subdivision — and has compiled a 10-1 record on the year. The Chanticleers would have brought an unbeaten resume to Williams-Brice Stadium Saturday had they not lost to FCS No. 16 Charleston Southern two weeks ago.
When the Gamecocks take on Coastal Carolina, they will try to avoid becoming the latest team to fall victim to a surprisingly good FCS challenger. In week one of the 2013 football season alone, eight FBS teams fell to FCS opponents.
Spurrier attributes some of the success of the smaller schools to the improving quality of athletes finding their way onto FCS rosters.
“The skill players, there’s a lot of them all over the country,” Spurrier said. “They can hang in there against some of the big universities. And sometimes, of course, beat them.”
Just last year, Wofford gave South Carolina a run for its money. The score was tied at seven for the first three quarters of the contest before the Gamecocks pulled away to win 24-7.
And if the low profile of the competition wasn’t enough to lull the Gamecocks into complacency, a game played across the country by a certan team from Columbia, Mo., that could distract the Gamecocks.
While South Carolina’s conference schedule wrapped up last weekend, the Missouri Tigers still have two more SEC contests left to play. If Missouri loses just one of those games, the Gamecocks would punch their ticket to the SEC Championship game.
Spurrier has been preaching to his players the importance of staying fixed on the task at hand rather than focusing on a Missouri game they have no control over, and statements from players like junior defensive end Jadeveon Clowney indicate that the coach has gotten through to his players.
“Right now, we’re just focused on the next game, which is Coastal,” Clowney said. “We’ll go out there and try to dominate them, and just keep going forward. And whatever happens, happens.”
While Spurrier emphasized that the Chanticleers are the main priority now, he acknowledged that he will be keeping one eye on the Missouri game Saturday with a coveted shot at the SEC title on the line.
“We’ll just watch what Missouri does from afar and not worry about it too much” Spurrier said. “We’ll worry about Coastal and try to beat those guys.”
Coastal Carolina, with its 10-1 record, is just one of the Gamecocks’ impressive out-of-conference opponents in 2013. Three of the four teams that make up South Carolina’s non-SEC schedule — Central Florida, Coastal and Clemson — each has just one loss.
Although it would be a major upset if the Chanticleers were to beat the Gamecocks, South Carolina is dealing with a viable distraction while the team waits to find out its SEC fate as Missouri plays out the rest of its schedule.
But Spurrier has managed to drill into the heads of his players the time-tested mantra of approaching the season one game at a time, according to redshirt junior cornerback Victor Hampton.
“Coach Spurrier always told us, you know, the next game is the most important game of our life, and that’s how we’re going to try to approach Coastal,” Hampton said. “This is an in-state team, so we don’t want them to have bragging rights on us going back to Myrtle Beach.”