THE SOUTH CAROLINA GAMECOCKS SERIOUSLY HIRED WILL MUSCHAMP: SHERMAN'S MARCH TO THE SEA

GREETINGS, LOYAL CONSTITUENTS. It is I, General Sherman, here to resume SHERMAN'S MARCH TO THE SEA.

The campaign will continue until my bloodlust is sated. Perhaps you thought this condition had been met already.

Oh. You'll know.

Besides, SHERMAN'S MARCH TO THE SEA is not the kind of job you can just quit on a Monday because it's going worse than you'd expected this time. What do you think I'm doing, coaching the South Carolina Gamecocks?

Yes, Steve Spurrier just up and called it quits in the middle of last season when he realized that not even he could sustain South Carolina as so much as a pretender to the SEC crown. Both Spurrier and Lou Holtz were burned out to the point of retirement by the Herculean task of building a respectable program in Columbia. Football can't take all the blame; people have been trying to produce respectable things in Columbia, South Carolina for many generations in spite of the odds against them.

As half of the Cocks/Beavers matchup with Oregon State that must never meet for a national championship, a relevant South Carolina program would produce endless innuendo about, say, whether or not they could plug the hole to stop the Crimson Tide from running all over them. However, the high point of the program has been the one season that Jadeveon Clowney was actually trying. Clowney was created when Steve Spurrier went into Create-A-Player Mode and turned all the stats up to maximum. The game didn't let him do that a second time, and thus they fell.

Prior to Clowney, South Carolina was a burgeoning threat with a rockstar quarterback. Not a quarterback who played at a transcendent level, but one who got drunk and trashed hotel rooms. Stephen Garcia, one of the greatest game managers the college game has ever seen. I don't believe any quarterback won more games while shitfaced, and he must have been an inspiration to his team. "Look guys I'm a little fucked up so I might need a few seconds to throw, but that post is gonna be open one of these times, and if I can hit that throw this drunk, then you sober fuckers oughta be able to get at least 20 yards out of it!"

The two most famous plays of Stephen Garcia's career are shown below. In the first, a referee has outside contain responsibilities for LSU and stops him at the line of scrimmage:

In the second, from South Carolina's 2010 win against Alabama, there is a problem with the snap and it goes towards the end zone. Garcia does a smart thing that looks incredibly dumb, essentially saying "FUCK THIS" and shooting the ball through the uprights like a basketball (shot rimmed out, nobody grabbed the rebound). This was a savvy move that also looked hilarious. It's Stephen Garcia in one play.

That season, South Carolina would end up playing the Florida State Seminoles in the Peach Bowl despite losing star runningback Marcus Lattimore during the season. Their loss in the Peach Bowl was largely blamed on Garcia getting totally shithoused en route to an apparent six-way in his hotel room the night before. Nobody even considered that maybe Spurrier shouldn't have run Lattimore into the ground so hard that Dusty Baker thought he should give him a rest. In 2011, American Hero Stephen Garcia was dismissed from the team. Giving us one of college football's great characters only to discard him so callously is a crime for which South Carolina must pay.

And pay they eventually did, losing to THE CITADEL last year. So with Spurrier's program broken, Columbia must be rebuilt. Sometimes, in order to rebuild something, you must first destroy it. I reached out to the University of South Carolina to see if they could use my vast experience in burning down things in Columbia, S.C. to accelerate this process.

When I read what their rebuilding solution was, I realized that they had come up with a much better method for burning the program to the ground than I'd had in mind. They hired Will Muschamp.

I cannot stress enough the fact that Muschamp, in his third year as the Florida Gators head coach, led the program to its first losing season since 1979. In just four years, Florida prepared fans for Urban Meyer's true successor by burning down everything he built. Perhaps this is the game at South Carolina.

The sad thing is, I didn't even need to write this entire article to shit-talk South Carolina. Nothing I can say will ever be harsher than the reality that they hired Will Muschamp as head coach in response to a season in which they lost to The Citadel.

SOUTH CAROLINA, YOU ARE DESTINED TO FOREVER BE AN AFTERTHOUGHT IN YOUR CULTURAL CESSPOOL OF A STATE DESPITE ACTUALLY CARRYING ITS NAME. CLEMSON HAMMERED THE FINAL NAIL IN THAT COFFIN LAST YEAR. I DESPISE YOU NOT JUST FOR INSTIGATING THE CONFEDERATE REBELLION BUT FOR TORPEDOING YOURSELVES SO HARD I COULDN'T COME UP WITH ANYTHING FUNNIER TO SAY THAN "THEY LOST TO THE CITADEL AND HIRED MUSCHAMP IN RESPONSE."

South Carolina's Next B1G Matchup: None Scheduled. Cowards.

Sherman's Next Destination: Your Nightmares