South Carolina is getting a little action on the blogs today. Team Speed Kills's Year 2 previews the Gamecocks here; the post is the first in a series on our guys. Year 2 predictably focuses on our QB issues. What he says is pretty promising: if Stephen Garcia comes through, we have the talent in place elsewhere on the offense to weather the players we lost.
In response to this column, Get the Picture asks why the league is so devoid of good quarterbacks outside of Jevan Snead and Tim Tebow. It's a valid question. A Team Speed Kills poll asks whether Joe Cox, Garcia, Jordan Jefferson, or Ryan Mallet will be the league's third-best signal caller. To say that all of these quarterbacks (outside of Mallet, I would say, who was highly recruited and will probably thrive under Bobby Petrino) have major question marks would be an understatement. The SEC may be a great football conference, but it's certainly not full of great quarterbacks right now.
Kyle King at Dawg Sports gets in on the action as well, calling us one team he expects to see decline in 2009. I'm not sure I understand what he means by "decline," as his write-up on us suggests that he expects us to have another six- or seven-win year, which would be status quo, not decline. He also expects Ole Miss to have a lower win total this year than last year. I can buy not believing the top-10 hype Ole Miss is receiving, but if you take a look at their schedule, you'll see a team that should easily win eight or nine games again.
The last bit of news for the day is that NC State linebacker Nate Irving broke his leg over the weekend in a car accident. That certainly won't hurt us come opening night in Raleigh, as Irving is one of the 'Pack's best defensive players, but I think we should all wish Irving a speedy recovery. First of all, Irving is an NFL talent and needs to get on the field to prove himself. Second of all, It's not as much fun beating a team when they're down.