Shane Beamer’s South Carolina football team will take on the Florida Gators at home this Saturday in a virtual must-win for the program. Carolina has just two victories so far on the season, and reaching the minimum program standard of 6 wins and a bowl bid will require the Gamecocks to be much better coming out of the Bye Week than they were prior to the week off.
After the matchup in the “Steve Spurrier Bowl,” South Carolina football will hit the road and travel to the other Columbia to take on the Missouri Tigers. Mizzou is coming off of their first loss of the year (a close battle with LSU) and will face a ranked Kentucky squad this weekend.
At 3:30 (2:30 local time in CoMo) on the SECNetwork, Beamer and the Gamecocks will look to get the team’s first-ever win over Eli Drinkwitz and first win over Missouri since 2018 when backup quarterback Michael Scarnecchia filled in for injured starter Jake Bentley (his only career start) and led Carolina to a soggy victory in a monsoon that seemed to hover over Williams-Brice Stadium.
The Gamecocks have not beaten the Tigers in CoMo since 2017, a game in which the Gamecocks went down by two scores before an electric Deebo Samuel kickoff return for touchdown kickstarted USC into a pretty dominant performance the rest of the way.
South Carolina and Missouri are part of a loaded middle class in the SEC. Georgia sits at the top, and Vanderbilt remains on the bottom. Other than that, no team has a clear spot in the SEC football hierarchy in the 2023 season. A loss for either team will push that program down to the bottom half of that middle class.