South Carolina football's 13th and final game of the 2022 season is officially known.

The Gamecocks will travel to Jacksonville for the Gator Bowl on Dec. 30, where it will take on the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.

This will mark the 25th trip to a bowl game in program history and the second consecutive season with one for the first time since going to bowls three years in a row from 2016-2018. Last season South Carolina went to Charlotte for the Duke's Mayo Bowl and defeated North Carolina 38-21 in Shane Beamer's first postseason outing. If the Gamecocks can turn the trick again, Beamer will become the first head coach in program history to win a bowl game in his first two seasons at the helm.

South Carolina and Notre Dame have one obvious piece of shared history with former head coach Lou Holtz winning 133 games across 17 seasons at the two schools, but they have not met head-to-head very often. This bowl game will only be the fourth time they have met, and the first time since 1984.

The Fighting Irish and Gamecocks played a home-and-home in 1976 and 1979 that Notre Dame pulled out close wins in by scores of 13-6 and 18-17, and then organized another series from 1983-1984. Notre Dame won a 30-6 blowout in Columbia in 1983, but the Gamecocks went to South Bend the following year and picked up their only win in the series by a 36-32 score as part of their school-record 9-0 start to the campaign.

Notre Dame is coming into the game off a 38-27 loss to the USC Trojans in the final week of the regular season, but the big question for Marcus Freeman's team right now surrounds the quarterback situation. Starting quarterback Drew Pyne has already announced he is going to enter the transfer portal. This will likely leave sophomore backup Tyler Buchner as the signal-caller. Buchner has not played since Notre Dame's week two loss to Marshall where he was only 18-of-32 passing with a pair of interceptions.

South Carolina does have history in this bowl game, but it is ancient by now. In 1946 1980, 1984 and 1987 the Gator Bowl opened its doors to the Gamecocks, but none of the four worked out well for the Gamecocks. Losses to Wake Forest, Pitt, Oklahoma State and LSU have this down as a bowl game South Carolina has never won.