Our Digital Season: Week 3 — South Carolina vs. Vanderbilt

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Take Our Digital Season. It's a simple little feature, but one that takes several hours to compile. I am not paid for these hours. I just like to bring you, the reader, some lighthearted fare to assuage the stresses of gameweek. I'll leave all that number crunching and analysis to our writers who have minds for such things. Me? I'm like that professor who taught the cushy elective you took senior semester: I'm not nearly as qualified as my peers, but you still love my class because we can talk about Breaking Bad and have a beer during office hours and I cancel every now and then because my folk band booked an out of town gig.

So when my benevolent efforts are PENALIZED by Freezus, the PS3-freezing trickster deity who apparently lives in the crawlspace behind my flatscreen, I get a little discouraged. Why, Freezus, why? I just want the nice people to know how the video game happened.

All this is to say, I simulated through this entire game—notes, videos, the whole thing—and it froze late in the fourth quarter. So I did it again—notes, videos—and it froze in the 3rd quarter. And there was much profanity and hurling of small pillows (holy crap, is that why they're called "throw pillows"? Must be!) Finally, I just quick-simmed the whole thing because I simply did not have the time to recreate the process. And then I got strep throat which turned me into a pathetic, couchbound man-infant which is why this feature's a couple of days behind. I'm sure you lost sleep over this delay, and I apologize. Nobody wins when Freezus is angry.

What? Last week? Last week! Here's what we got right:

Curious Overlaps:

• Georgia won so freakin' hooray for ODS

• A. Murray threw for 4 TDs in both ODS and IRL

• Shaw's stats in ODS: 252 yards and 2 TDs. Shaw's stats IRL: 228 yards, 2 TDs.

Notable Contrast:

• Clowney's mammoth ODS performance (8 tackls, 4 TFL, 2 sacks) wasn't echoed IRL bc Georgia's a bunch of sack-fleein' weenies who can't take a hit

• ODS called for the Cocks to contain the Gurshall combo for a second consecutive year. NOPE.

• On the other hand, ODS also had Georgia containing Davis/Wilds, which wasn't the case either.

ODS enters week 3 at 2-0. Again, I planned on a full write-up but since that went to hell, here's a whole bunch of charts for y'all asses.

Box Score

So, spoiler alert, we won. I forgot to do a "Final" column and I'm bad at manual code so in case you can't add, we won 36-29.

Scoring summary:

Final Stats

Team Stats

FINAL ANALYSIS

So what to make of this spreadsheet hash? You can spy at least one unbelievable bit from the outset: Connor Shaw won't be throwing 52 times for 442 yards, especially when Vanderbilt's rush defense is its Achilles heel IRL. But aside from that, there's a sort of soft plausibility to the way this simulation played out. If the sting of the UGA loss is lingering, it may well take us a half of football to kick into gear. And while giving up 400+ yards seems unlikely, we aren't exactly brimming with confidence after last week. But as Gamecock Man points out in his 3 Keys and Prediction piece, "Even if our defense fails the test, we should be able to outscore the 'Dores." Such was the case in Week 3 of ODS.