The final loop of the regular season for South Carolina’s herky-jerky amusement park ride of an offense was a doozy.

In true one step forward, two steps back nature of the Gamecock offense this season, South Carolina followed up a promising performance against Auburn in another anemic performance in a shutout loss.

“It’s extremely frustrating. We knew it was going to be a challenge coming into this thing. They’re really good defensively and been a problem for everybody. We knew they were disruptive,” Shane Beamer said. “I liked our plan going in and felt like we were going to be able to run the football and weren’t able to.”

Like most games, South Carolina’s offense sputtered early—putting up just 12 total yards of offense in the first quarter—and, unlike Auburn, couldn’t claw their way out of it.

The Gamecocks’ first moving of the chains came nearly 18 minutes into the game as an offensive game plan Beamer liked entering Saturday’s rivalry game struggled to get off the ground.

It was a struggle to get anything going because of field position—South Carolina’s average starting spot was its own 27 compared to Clemson’s own 36—and the Gamecocks only ran 18 plays in Clemson territory with seven coming on the final drive of the game.

“The first quarter was tough from a field position standpoint. We could never get the field position flipped. We were backed up and couldn’t execute our offense like we wanted to execute it because of the field position. We had to get ourselves out of those situations,” Beamer said.

“Then we had a critical interception down there that gave them points. We have to be better coming out on offense. But overall I felt good about it going into it. Give them credit, but we didn’t help ourselves. Way too many self-inflicted wounds, too.”

South Carolina rushed for fewer than 2.5 yards and averaged less than 3.5 yards per play against the Tigers, only the seventh time that’s happened in a game since 2000.

It’s the first time the Gamecocks haven’t scored against the Tigers since 1989.

The frustrating part for South Carolina players and fans is this performance comes after scoring 21 of the final 24 points last week against Auburn and putting up 40 and 28 points the previous two weeks against Florida and Missouri.

Now they’ll have to regroup and get the offense prepared for a bowl game.

“It’s frustrating, but you have to put it behind you and keep going,” Zeb Noland said. “You have to put it behind you and keep working and keep trying to score points. We bounced back almost every week we’ve had a down week, whether it was Missouri to auburn or A&M to Florida. I expect to do the same with this team.”

If there is a silver lining it is the Gamecocks will get a chance to go bowling this year, but they’ll have to be better offensively to avoid having a losing season this year.

“Nights like these stink really, really bad but I’m really excited about the future and the opportunity to send these seniors out with a win and honor them for all they done for this program,” Beamer said.

“They wanted this one bad, obviously, against these guys. I told them in the locker room I’m sorry I didn’t do a better job of having us ready to execute at a higher level. I know how important this game was for them.”

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