Football Notes

Gamecocks make plans to wrestle with Peasants

In an move of almost unparalleled stupidity, South Carolina has agreed to play East Carolina in football 5 times. The teams will meet as follows:

2011 Charlotte
2012 Columbia
2014 Charlotte
2015 @ Greenville, NC
2016 Columbia

Why is this so monumentally stupid? I'll tell you why - no good can come from this. There are 4 possible scenarios that come from playing ECU 1) we win close 2) we win big 3) we lose close 4) we lose big. Here are the corresponding reactions from the college football savy world: 1) You all aren't any good - you barely beat ECU 2) so what, it was ECU 3) holy shit - you lost to ECU ha ha ha 4) actually I don't think I would be able to verbalize this; a loss like this to a team like this would actually cause the program to begin a rapid sprint backward. Three out of the 4 outcomes are bad for us.

I know what you are thinking - so what if they are not good, are we supposed to try to play Southern Cal in our out of conference weeks? Of course not, playing ECU in and of itself is not a bad thing. Playing ECU 5 times in 6 years is a bad idea. We have nothing to gain. We are not going to start some new rivalry with ECU (God forbid the series is that competitive). All that can happen is that the series legitimizes ECU. It cannot help us, it can only bring us down. Most people in the country probably don't know what state ECU is in, much less what town.

A further problem - why in God's name are we doing anything with ECU other than paying them to come here. We are going to Greenville, NC!??!!? (that's where ECU is located by the way) That's one home game we are giving away that year for no reason. Two other years we are going to split Charlotte with them - also a problem of sacrificing a home game for no obvious gain.

And if we are going to go to the trouble to go to Charlotte for a neutral site, shouldn't we be playing a major school from North Carolina there? I understand that neither North Carolina nor NC State wanted to take part in a "Border War" in Charlotte. Do you know what that means? There is no longer any reason to play the game there. We now have just sacrificed any sort of pseudo-regional relevance for nothing.

Why is ECU getting any respect at all from our athletic department? Would you go meet Central Florida for a game in Jacksonville? Or how about playing neutral games with UTEP, Rice or Marshall?? No? Would that be ridiculous - well, they are all in the same conference with ECU. Hell, Rice finished with a better in conference record last year.

Now our best case scenario is to beat the piss out of this second or third tier team and then endure the mocking from the collective college football world as they look at our out of conference schedule.

Oh and by the way - I don't give two shits who their coach happens to be right now, what he thinks he was promised / should have been promised, or how he has managed to reinvent an offense that was so predicable when we last saw it, that any barely functioning retard could predict the next play.

Nobles should never wrestle with the peasants. Hell, if the Russians figured it out, you would think Hyman could too.

In Good News - This Year's Schedule is Brutal

This year our away conference games are @ Arkansas, @ Georgia, @ Tennessee and @ LSU. The rest isn't much better. Rivals thinks we have the second hardest schedule in the nation, though an argument could certainly be made for first. Read about it here.