South Carolina not worried about SEC standings or rankings, focused on 'improving our product'
They hear the outside noise around them. They aren’t tone deaf to it.
South Carolina knows it is no longer just some feel good story. It is a hungry team that can win any given game. And the rest of the country can now see that.
As the Gamecocks head into another crucial week, they’ve got so much to play for. At the moment, they’re currently in a heavyweight battle to reign supreme in the SEC. With seven games left, they are still fighting for the regular season title. It would solidify them as the No. 1 seed in the conference tournament next month.
“We haven’t yet, but to be honest with you,” head coach Lamont Paris said about the SEC standings. “In my mind, that last game was the domino we needed to fall before we could start having the audacity to look at what the standings are and where we are in the standings. I think we are to that point. Certainly the guys have, and we’ll talk about it a little bit.”
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South Carolina sits in first place next to Alabama, a team it lost to over a month ago. But since that game, the Gamecocks have been steaming hot, winners of eight of their last nine.
And with all those wins has come some notoriety. After seven long years, they finally earned a ranking from the AP poll, checking in at No. 15. Now this week, after grabbing wins over Ole Miss and Vanderbilt, they’ve climbed up to No. 11 in the nation.
“I think we talked about the number and we joked about how the number shrank over the weekend,” Paris said. “The more things that you end up getting done, the more the number will continue to shrink if you have successes. It was a big deal at one point that our guys wanted a number next to their name. I think they felt slighted at some point. We were so focused on some other things that it kind of took care of itself that we weren’t overly consumed with the number. And so I think that’s where we are.”
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Instead of fixating on a number or where it stands in the conference, South Carolina cares more about the next game and “improving our product.”
“I think there’s still some room for growth in our product,” Paris said. “At some point, that won’t be the case, we’ll be doing it all. We’ll be playing the best that we can possibly play. And then you just try to do that for as long as you can. And you can’t do that for a whole season and I don’t think you can do that for two months. But if you can start finding your way to that mode here in the next week or two, I think you can do that the rest of the season and ride it out.”
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What comes next is a trip to face No. 13 Auburn, a team that is also fighting to be the top dog in the SEC. Paris said with so many things going on, it will be hard to worry about playing a team ranked right near them.
“Auburn’s going to play incredibly hard because that’s what they do. It’s a home game for them, they’re in a race with seven games left, and we’re a team that’s also in the race,” he said. “The fact that we have a number and where it relates to their number, I think there’s so many more factors that are going to motivate them to play really hard regardless.”
