Five things we learned from South Carolina's 20-point loss to Alabama

South Carolina showed some good in its first game since a 35-point loss to Mississippi State over the weekend. But overall, there’s still plenty of work to do.

The Gamecocks (10-5, 0-2 SEC) lost 88-68 to No. 5 Alabama at Colonial Life Arena on Wednesday night.

Here are five things we learned from watching the way the Gamecocks performed against the Crimson Tide.

Liked the aggressiveness at the start; need to show that for 40 minutes

In the opening minutes of the game, South Carolina came out playing as aggressive as it’s played all season. The Gamecocks were tenacious on defense, making every shot Alabama took a tough one. As a result, they owned the lead for the first four minutes and forced five turnovers by the midway point of the first half.

However, that aggressiveness was never the same throughout the rest of the night. It’s unclear what changed or why they shifted away from playing that style of basketball. It certainly worked.

That’s what it’s going to take to win games. South Carolina needs to get to a point where it’s being the team that makes life hard for the other team. But at the very least, it was good to see the team show they can do that.

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Alabama won this game without an overload of threes

If there’s anything to know about this Alabama team, the Tide like to take their three-point shots. They average the fifth-most three-pointers taken with 32.6 per game. Because of this, one of the main keys going into the game was for South Carolina to force some misses from the outside.

Alabama still had some success shooting 8-for-19 from behind the arc. But this was far less attempts than what it has been used to taking this season. Even without a lot of outside shots, the Tide dominated inside the arc and went 27-for-45 (60 percent) on two-pointers.

The problem for South Carolina was that it couldn’t stop fouling on the way up and sent Alabama to the free throw line for a lot of and-one opportunities. So, in a way, even though the Tide weren’t living and dying by the three ball, they still finished with plenty of three-point plays.

SEC play hasn’t been kind to CMB

For a second consecutive game, South Carolina received little to no production from Collin Murray-Boyles, as the sophomore forward went for six points and eight rebounds. This was coming off a game in which he had more turnovers than points against Mississippi State.

Much like the Bulldogs did, Alabama guarded against Murray-Boyles very well on Wednesday. Tide head coach Nate Oats was happy with Mouhamed Dioubate’s defensive efforts going up against the Gamecocks’ best player.

While it’s a little concerning to see him struggle this much, it may end up just being a slump for Murray-Boyles. There will be more evidence as to what the case is with a bigger sample size. But it’s clear he’s not doing much of anything against other SEC big men.

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Still got a lot to figure out

Even though South Carolina played slightly better than it did in the SEC opener, that’s not saying a lot. It was going to be hard to do much worse than a 35-point loss last Saturday. There were some flashes in this game but not enough.

While the Gamecocks are allowing 67 points per game this year, which isn’t all too bad by any means, the last two games have been rough for this defense. After giving up 85 points on 56.5 percent shooting to Mississippi State, they let Alabama, the highest scoring offense in college basketball, go for 88 points on 54.7 percent shooting.

So, in SEC play, the games that actually mean a lot more, South Carolina’s defense is giving up 86.5 points per game. Couple that with 15 turnovers and four bench points, there’s still a lot for this team to work through.

The SEC schedule has been really hard

Stating the obvious at this point, but despite all of South Carolina’s faults, it hasn’t helped at all playing a rigorous schedule to open conference play. Mississippi State and Alabama are both solid teams and it only gets tougher from here with No. 2 Auburn coming into town on Saturday.

Things may only get worse from here with the Tigers bound to be ranked No. 1 in the country next week if they keep playing the way they have. And for the Gamecocks, they’re catching the best teams right out of the gate this month. Then again, that’s how it’s going to be the rest of the way with how good the SEC is this year.

Once South Carolina gets through this week, things should calm down a little bit with a road trip to Vanderbilt and Oklahoma, even though those games are still going to be tough. The wins might not come right away, but at the very least, the team needs to continue to show more signs of progress to get this thing right.

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