COLUMBIA — A night South Carolina will never forget.

A night Tennessee could never forget, and from what it looks like, will never get over.

Four years ago, a College Football Playoff-bound Tennessee squad ranked fifth in the country walked into Williams-Brice Stadium looking to fine-tune its postseason resume. It left with a mortifying 63-38 defeat, one of the biggest upsets in the Gamecocks’ program history and a game that will forever have tags attached to it, the biggest being, “How?,” and exclaimed by each fan base.

For those in garnet, it's another example that anything can happen when it comes to USC football and to relive just how magical that evening was. For those in orange, it’s the starting point of a discussion that often veers into reasons far beyond being outplayed.

“Other losses, you can find a reason, you can rationalize them. That one, you just still don’t know,” said Brent Hubbs, longtime publisher of Volquest, since 2000 one of the most trusted voices for Volunteer sports coverage. “Tennessee fans will always wonder, ‘What the hell happened?’”

“I love how the Tennessee fans still talk about it to this day,” said Spencer Rattler, the maestro of the Gamecocks’ offensive symphony that day, in a text message between hours working as the backup quarterback of the New Orleans Saints. “That means you did something right! ;)”

The buildup

Tennessee was rising in its second year under coach Josh Heupel, a national-championship winning quarterback at Oklahoma who had made his bones as an offensive wunderkind at UCF. He brought his system — which emphasized extremely fast tempo, spreading the entire field but still featuring a punishing rushing attack — which took a year to get installed but in 2022 was flourishing.

The Vols were 9-1. They were named the CFP’s top seed on Nov. 1 but were popped by Georgia four days later (the Bulldogs would go on to win the national championship). Yet Tennessee rebounded with a 66-24 butchering of Missouri the next week.

The Gamecocks were in their second year under Shane Beamer, and after a surprising 7-6 first season had begun 5-2 during the 2022 season. But a listless loss to Missouri, a win at Vanderbilt and then a dreadful 38-6 loss at Florida — the Gamecocks gave up 374 rushing yards and scored their only touchdown on a fake punt against a team that would end 6-7 — had them at 6-4.

USC hadn’t beaten a ranked team since 2020, a top-5 team since 2019. The Vols were a three-touchdown favorite. 

The game

The Gamecocks marched right downfield and scored a touchdown, Rattler finding Jaheim Bell on a sideline route to the pylon. If the Vols were unnerved by giving up their first opening-drive touchdown of the season — they’d only allowed three points on an opening drive all year and none in the last seven games — they didn’t show it.

Quarterback Hendon Hooker led Tennessee on a four-play TD drive, ducking a sack for 29 yards with his feet and then handing off to Jabari Small for a 31-yard scoring run. Even-up, 9:30 in the first quarter, Minnesota Fats telling Fast Eddie it was time to play.

The Gamecocks scored touchdowns on each of their next four possessions. It was 35-24 at the half. The Vols cut the score to 35-31 with 9:53 to go in the third quarter, and there had to be thoughts, on each side, that USC's Cinderella chariot was about to transform back into a pumpkin.

But midnight had come and gone. The Gamecocks scored two more TDs, Hooker went down with what turned out to be a season-ending injury when his knee buckled while cutting on an option play, and USC completed a monumental, stunning, head-scratching victory.

Reasons

The immediate aftermath was about finding reasons. The Gamecocks had discarded nearly an entire season’s worth of inconsistent offense and posted their second-highest number of points ever against an SEC opponent.

“We just put together a great plan and wanted to attack them aggressively. It was almost a, ‘Just let it rip,’ mindset. Everything came together that night,” said Rattler, who went from having six touchdowns, seven interceptions and around 197 yards per game against SEC teams to completing 30 of 37 passes for 438 yards and six TDs against the Vols. “I feel like we couldn’t be stopped and I couldn’t miss a throw. We were in flow state as an offense.”

USC rolled up 606 yards. Tennessee had 507 and still got pummeled.

Again … how?

“There was a throw that Rattler made really early. The guy started to his left, he hit him on a cross, and I thought, ‘This might not go the way Tennessee wants it to,’” said Mike Wilson, now a part of Hubbs’ Volquest team but then with the Knoxville News-Sentinel. “Rattler went supernova.”

Reason 1: It was 35-31 and the Vols needed a stop. They yielded a nine-play, 65-yard touchdown drive. Hooker and company got the ball back but couldn’t get anything going despite two USC penalties (pass interference and face mask, each committed by Cam Smith, who became famous for his own catchphrase after the game). Tennessee’s Jacob Warren was flagged for offensive pass interference to bring up a third-and-25, which the Vols couldn’t convert.

The Gamecocks added another touchdown on a drive bridging the quarter break.

Reason 2: Hooker tore his ACL three quarters after tearing his meniscus. He didn’t know about the former when it happened, but he now regrets not sitting out the rest of that game, according to a July story in The Tennessean.

Those are football reasons. Others bordered on the mystical.

Tennessee wore orange helmets with a white “T” — normally it’s the opposite — for the first time in the modern era. The Vols darned sure haven’t worn them since.

The turf at Williams-Brice Stadium was not the best. Hubbs remembered walking it before the game, and there were a lot of patches with paint on them. But both teams had to play on it.

There was the curious case of Jeremy Banks, a Tennessee linebacker who was not there that night, the only game he missed all year. Rumors flew about his absence and what may or may not have happened to cause it.

Weird stuff happens when Tennessee plays USC in Columbia. Phillip Fulmer and his predecessor, Johnny Majors, were each told their services were no longer required after losing at Williams-Brice. 

Peyton Manning beat USC in Williams-Brice in 1997 but didn’t play particularly well; that’s one reason some have pointed out as to why he didn’t win the Heisman Trophy that season.

Tennessee fans have come up with “Battered Vol Syndrome,” a version of every fan base’s mantra that something bad will happen just when things are looking up. The Vols had been wandering through the desert since the rough end of the Fulmer era, bouncing through four coaches from 2009-20 and relegated to some big wins or merely nice seasons along the way. Heupel arrived and produced near-instant success, soaring toward the playoff, about to play a ragged team and then …

“They’re in the conversation with everybody, they’re back, they’re relevant, and then ka-pam! That happens. When Georgia won, hey, that’s because that was a good football team. Tennessee probably wasn’t ready for that one on the road,” Hubbs said. “That South Carolina game, that’s in Shane’s wheelhouse, the chip-on-the-shoulder Shane that thrives in a lot of ways.”

Hubbs of course was reading his message board during the game and making sure nobody got too out of line, and saw mostly the normal during a loss.

“It was a lot of frustrated, lot of mad and angry and upset,” he said. “Just from the standpoint of all the crazy things that were involved in that game.”

Then came Dec. 1.

Aha!

A member of Volquest, “ArniePalmerAlert,” posted it on Dec. 1, 2022. He said one of his younger brother’s friends was a scout for Michigan. According to “Arnie,” Michigan was paying this scout to go to other games (the first was alleged to be a Tennessee-Vanderbilt affair) and steal teams’ signs, and they were never allowed to talk to Wolverines coach Jim Harbaugh about it.

Then he posted again in January 2023, saying that Michigan had all of Tennessee’s signs just in case the Wolverines and Vols met in the playoff.

Now it’s a case of a frustrated fan base and a theory. Now a name gets produced and that name is linked to buying several tickets over the past seasons for games involving opponents who may have spelled trouble for Michigan if they ever played each other.

Now every twig gets thrown onto the bonfire. Did you know USC defensive coordinator Clayton White worked under Harbaugh at Stanford? And wasn’t Beamer involved in that whole “WakeyLeaks” thing?

All this begins percolating right about the time Tennessee fans re-watch the game and see something different. Gamecock defenders were wearing wristbands. They hadn’t done that before.

USC offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield also resigned two days after the regular-season finale — another strong offensive game but one where the Gamecocks had to overcome several of their own mistakes to beat Clemson 34-31 — to take the OC job at Nebraska. Why was he leaving then when he had just seemingly figured everything out?

And someone even threw out that yeah, the Gamecocks trucked in sand and deposited it all over their field beforehand!

“In general,” Hubbs chuckled, “everybody loves a good conspiracy theory.”

Stalions, who has coached high-school ball and these days opines on Michigan and other college football topics online, denied the claim.

“I’ve never met anyone at South Carolina,” Stalions said on a podcast. But of course that doesn’t mean anything to a fan base, especially when Stalions admitted he shared signals with Michigan rival Ohio State in 2021, because Ohio State needed to beat Michigan State, which would help Michigan’s season.

The other answers:

White appeared on The Hit Stick Podcast with Gamecock greats Whit Merrifield and Patrick DiMarco and talked about the wristbands. It was simple, he said: As the DC, he was most concerned about simulating Tennessee’s tempo in practice, so he had the offensive scout team wear wristbands. Then it could keep running plays as the defense tried to get conditioned to it.

Smith asked if the defense could have wristbands, too, and White said that was a good idea.

“Six plays were on it. I was telling the guys, ‘On the sideline, we’re going to call two plays,’” he said. “‘Wristband 1, Wristband 3, those are the calls. Don’t even look over here.’”

Tennessee running backs coach Jerry Mack also spoke on the topic.

“Honestly, we just didn’t play well enough that night. We weren’t clicking on all cylinders,” he told A To Z Sports in July. “I’m not a big conspiracy theory guy. I don’t really believe in people stealing signals. That’s really not my deal. I just believe that you go out there and play to the best of your ability and put a great game plan together, and you’ve got a chance to win any game.”

That story also says some of the Vols said the week after that they overlooked USC.

USC’s defense gave up over 500 yards and 38 points. If the Gamecocks were stealing signals, they certainly didn’t do a very good job of displaying it. As for the offense, it was more USC concentrating on what it did best and eliminating the clutter, which Rattler and others confirmed in 2023.

“We did not steal any signals or anything like that. I don’t know why or how people would think that,” Rattler said. “I think it’s pretty funny.”

Spice

Wilson has seen it on both sides. He covered South Carolina before he moved to Knoxville.

“I spent enough nights in Williams-Brice Stadium to know that place can get crazy. The conspiracy theory picked up steam, and once the Stalions thing got linked, it took off. The South Carolina offensive stats weren’t good until that final month. Most conspiracies have a kernel of truth in them, and it’s up to the individual to interpret it,” he said. “But Tennessee had an opportunity. Hooker got hurt late. It was the closest Tennessee had come in so long, and there’s that residual feeling of questioning just what happened.”

Gamecock fans still cackle about it (the term “butthurt” is frequently used) like they don’t have their own ingrained theories. The “Chicken Curse” was made popular as a reason why none of the school’s teams could find success (although Merrifield’s game-winning single in 2010 to win the College World Series has also been noted as the death blow to that supposed hex).

The ACC’s dislike of Frank McGuire and the decision to leave that conference in 1971 is also mentioned as a reason for losing … 55 years later.

And don’t you dare mention the 2024 LSU game. All those terrible calls, and who’s to say the SEC wasn’t behind them because it just couldn’t have the little ol’ Gamecocks crashing the CFP party, could it?

“(2022) felt like such a one-off. South Carolina had won some games. It’s not like they were terrible,” Hubbs said. “But they had just a couple of uh-ohs, and for them to score 63 points, Tennessee fans, all of us even that cover the team, it’s, ‘What went on down there?”

Of all the reasons, excuses, answers and hypotheses presented, is there any actual evidence to say something untoward did or did not happen? No.

Will that ever stop the speculation? No. Especially not in this age, where the internet has made it a norm to equal and often surpass expertise with volume.

As the No. 11 Volunteers prepare to come down the mountain and face USC at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, the lore of that game is a major topic. The Gamecocks went to Knoxville in 2023 and were pasted 41-20, and that ended a streak of playing Tennessee every season since 1992. This is the rebirth of the series, and the storylines are again juicy.

The Gamecocks shucked three games of rollercoaster offense and spotty defense to smack Florida 38-19 two weeks ago. The Vols, trying to figure out their own offense and dealing with dueling quarterbacks, put a boot in Alabama’s behind last week and are now fully back in the CFP hunt.

The SEC has been so topsy-turvy that anything can happen. But what happened four years ago lives on and will continue to.

Half the fans screamed cheers, half screamed cheating. For one night in 2022, all of what makes college football so incendiary and incredible was on display in Columbia.