On Tim Brando's radio show yesterday, Brando and Joker Phillips used powerful words to describe what South Carolina football is today, and it was nice to hear. After all, we're not that far removed from losing 21 games in a row. Since that horrible skid ended in 2000, the Gamecocks have won 72 games, including 3 bowl victories. The University of South Carolina is not overlooked when it takes the field in any of the vaunted SEC houses of glory. We're to be reckoned with. We're legit; something we weren't during nearly all of the 1990s, our first decade in the best college football conference in America. Mediocrity mostly spells our past, but 72 wins in the last 10 and a half seasons, 39 of them in the last 5 and a half, tells a story of a Carolina football program calling in a demolition crew to knock down a wall with "mediocre" written on it in big letters.
As we prepare to begin the second half of the 2010 football season, the Gamecocks are ranked #19 in the country and control their own destiny in the SEC East. Two weeks ago South Carolina soundly defeated the #1 team in the land, the storied Crimson Tide, in front of a sellout crowd at Williams-Brice Stadium. We have won 15 of the last 18 games played in Columbia. The South Carolina Gamecocks are not mediocre, but the team has to stop the mistakes that act as squatters in front of the metaphorical wall that Steve Spurrier is trying to tear down. We must beat Vanderbilit tonight and bring an end to the road losing streak. The crew needs to show up for work. It's time to start banging away again.