Everyone can see how bad it is, but just how bad?

South Carolina baseball has lost six consecutive games by a combined score of 60-28, suffering back-to-back sweeps at the hands of Georgia and Tennessee to go from an NCAA Tournament lock to the bubble.

The context of the skid alone puts it in a unique pantheon for a program with baseball history going all the way back to 1892, but what about the magnitude? If you can stomach the grim reading, here is a look at how this losing streak stacks up with others in school history.

One aspect of these last two weeks is all six games have been in conference play. The lack of a midweek game sandwiched between the two series. Since the program joined the SEC in 1992, the longest losing streak in conference play stands at seven games during the dismal 2019 season, a campaign the Gamecocks concluded just 8-22 in conference play.

Chad Holbrook’s tenure actually never featured an SEC losing streak of even five games in his five seasons. Ray Tanner’s third year at the helm in 1999 featured one such streak, and the final year of the June Raines era also concluded with a six-game losing streak, the only other time the Gamecocks have lost this many games to close a regular season.

Mark Kingston’s 2021 squad also suffered a six-game losing streak, but still ended up making the NCAA Tournament with a 16-14 overall SEC record.

Even if the Gamecocks pull out a win over Alabama in their Hoover opener to snap the streak, a six-game losing streak is already a hyper-rare occurrence for this program. As it concludes its the 132nd season of play, this is only the 13th six-game losing streak ever. Right there, you are already at a stretch of futility which only comes around in Columbia about once a decade on average.

It is the third such streak of the Kingston era to go along with the aforementioned 2019 and 2021 slides, and Raines had another one in 1994 to go along with his tenure-concluding seven straight losses overall in 1996. The Tanner years actually never featured a six-game losing streak in 16 seasons, with his one SEC streak broken up by a midweek victory between conference losses.

The other eight streaks all date back to well before the program’s initial successes and establishment as a force in college baseball, with the most recent of those — 1961 — coming over a full decade before South Carolina’s first ever trip to Omaha in 1975.

This means if the Gamecocks lose Tuesday to make it number seven, it will tie the program’s longest losing streak since John F. Kennedy was in office and Tanner himself was a 3-year-old.

The one silver lining for South Carolina — and it is indeed a very hollow one — is this streak cannot possibly rise to being the worst in school history. The modern era, maybe. But not ever. Even with a loss in Hoover and two losses in a potential regional to make it nine straight to end the season, it would still not reach the lowest depths.

Last time South Carolina baseball lost more than seven games in a row was actually the longest losing streak in program history, a whopping 15-game losing streak in 1961. The year prior they lost eight in a row and three other streaks — 1920, 1947, 1951 — lasted at least nine games with two in double-digits.

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