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ANALYSIS: Revisiting South Carolina's 2024 Football Schedule

South Carolina's Football team just played a gauntlet of a schedule in 2023, and while 2024 is easier in some aspects, it will be another challenging slate.
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For the first time since the 2020 season and the beginning of the Shane Beamer that subsequent offseason, the South Carolina Gamecocks will not be going bowling in December. It's a signal to the program that certain components need to be reexamined to ensure that Carolina doesn't allow one down year to turn into a full-blown downward spiral.

While getting more talent in the building via the portal and high school recruiting will undoubtedly help, sometimes you must also benefit from a lucky draw in your upcoming schedule to bounce back. With that bearing in mind, let's take a look at South Carolina's 2024 football schedule:

South Carolina's 2024 Football Games

vs Old Dominion (Aug. 31st)

vs Akron (Sept. 21st)

@ Oklahoma

@ Alabama

@ Kentucky

@ Vanderbilt

vs LSU

vs Ole Miss

vs Missouri

vs Texas A&M

vs Wofford (Nov. 23rd)

@ Clemson (Nov. 30th)

Before we do a complete breakdown of the schedule, I want to quickly rehash some facts about the 2023 schedule for the Gamecocks; the schedule was the toughest in the country in terms of the opponents' collective win-loss record (103-53) from the 2022 season, and every single non-conference opponent had won nine games or more the year prior.

Comparing that to South Carolina's 2024 schedule, a few things stand out. One, the non-conference portion of the schedule is MUCH easier for the Gamecocks, as they'll face Old Dominion, Akron, Wofford (FCS), and Clemson. Only one of those teams, Clemson, finished the 2023 regular season with more than six wins.

While the non-con portion of their 2024 slate is more manageable, Carolina's SEC schedule will be more daunting from top to bottom as they swap out Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and Mississippi State for Alabama, Oklahoma, Ole Miss, and LSU, all of whom won 9 or more games this Fall. That's not even considering that Beamer's squad will have to play two of that group's three most talented teams, Alabama and Oklahoma, on the road.

Without bowl games having been played yet, the collective win percentage for the Gamecocks 2024 opponents is 58.7 percent, which, if measured against 2023 data, would've resulted in the 19th toughest schedule in the FBS and the 7th toughest in the SEC.

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