Dawn Staley calls for South Carolina men's basketball team to be ranked

South Carolina is rapidly turning into a basketball school in 2024 and it’s the men’s program that appears to be rapidly catching up to the women’s dominance.

On Tuesday night, the men’s team knocked off a top-10 opponent for the second time in a week. This time it was a road trip to take down No. 5 Tennessee that did the trick, one week after South Carolina hosted and upended No. 6 Kentucky.

Yet the Gamecocks remain unranked, despite reaching an 18-3 mark this season.

That doesn’t sit right with one person in particular. And Dawn Staley, the coach of the No. 1 ranked women’s basketball team, made sure everyone knew about it on Tuesday night.

“Don’t rank us. … we went ahead and beat another ranked team. … a top 5 ranked team,” Staley wrote on Twitter. “Rank me please! And rank me inside the top 20.”

South Carolina has now won four straight games in conference play and is quickly proving it will be a force to be reckoned with down the stretch. The Gamecocks sit just outside of Alabama‘s SEC lead, with the Crimson Tide having dropped only one contest.

Other programs, like Tennessee, Auburn and Kentucky are nipping at Alabama’s heels too, each sporting two losses in conference play.

But Dawn’s point is a solid one. When will South Carolina be ranked? Perhaps the biggest factor preventing that currently is the team’s non-conference slate, which wasn’t overly difficult.

South Carolina dropped its most difficult non-conference game, falling to Clemson 72-67 on the road. Still, it’s impossible to ignore the current run of form the Gamecocks are on, to Staley’s point. Just ask Tennessee or Kentucky.

South Carolina made Dalton Knecht work for it

Tennessee star Dalton Knecht did everything humanly possible to will the Volunteers to a win on Tuesday night, including hitting multiple 3-pointers in the final minute of the game. That was OK with South Carolina, which let Knecht get his but made him work for everything.

The Tennessee star finished with 31 points but needed 24 shots to get there.

The South Carolina staff was happy with how the team defended the SEC star in the first half, something that is certainly not easy to do.

“Done a pretty good job,” coach Lamont Paris said at halftime, speaking to SEC Network sideline reporter Alyssa Lang. “We let him get loose on one layup in transition, that was a big part of what we said we didn’t want to do. But for the most part the points that he’s gotten he’s earned.”