South Carolina basketball is desperately trying to avoid the same fate as last year

If there’s any team in college basketball refusing to pat themselves on the back for their impressive performance during the non-conference portion of the season, it’s South Carolina.

The Gamecocks were the next-to-last team in the country to taste defeat last season, winning their first 15 games of the campaign before getting hammered by 23 on the road against Alabama on Jan. 13. Only SMU went deeper into the season before suffering their first loss.

The lopsided defeat in Tuscaloosa proved to be a sign of things to come for Frank Martin’s team. They went just 11-7 in a weak SEC, lost to Georgia in the first round of the conference tournament, and then failed to hear their name called on Selection Sunday for a 12th straight year.

Fast forward a year and South Carolina finds itself in an eerily similar situation with conference play set to begin in a week.

Believing that his team’s super-light early schedule the season before had done more harm than good, Martin opted to put his team through the ringer during the first two months of 2016-17. The Gamecocks squared off against ranked teams in Michigan and Syracuse, defeating both by double-digits. They also faced a pair of potential tournament teams from major conferences in Seton Hall and rival Clemson, losing to both in single-possession games. USC also played RPI-boosting games against potential lower-conference champions like Monmouth, Louisiana Tech, and Holy Cross, and escaped all of them without being harmed. The team also has one more chance for a quality non-conference win when they face Memphis in a true road game on Friday night.

So for a second straight season, South Carolina has done enough to make the college hoops world familiar with their work, but not enough to convince everyone that said work will be consolidated during the season’s second half.

Of paramount concern at the moment is the indefinite suspension of senior star Sindarius Thornwell, who leads the team in scoring (18.7 ppg), rebounding (6.7 rpg), and assists (4.1 apg). Thornwell’s suspension was announced on Dec. 4, and there’s been no word since as far as how long he’ll be sidelined.

Thornwell’s absence has forced more responsibility on previously lesser-used freshmen like Maik Kotsar, Rakym Felder, and Sedee Keita. It’s also forced sophomore PJ Dozier, one of the program’s most-heralded recruits in recent memory, to make a full-fledged star turn.

While Dozier was one of the country’s most underrated guards while he was sharing the backcourt with Thornwell, he is in the process of evolving into a household name without him. The Columbia native has scored 20 or more points in all five of South Carolina’s games in the month of December, and he’s also in the midst of his best run of production when it comes to rebounding, assists, and steals as well.

Still, Dozier’s brilliance has done nothing to minimize the fact that for a second straight season, South Carolina has a sparkling record but more questions than answers as it prepares to head into the new year.

Thornwell’s return, assuming it happens at the start of SEC play as most believe, will obviously be an enormous boon, but that alone likely won’t be enough to ensure the Gamecocks a seat at the tournament table.

Senior guards Duane Notice and Justin McKie were both expected to take massive steps forward while assuming larger roles this season, but so far that hasn’t happened. The players are both putting up modest averages relative to their preseason expectations, and combined to go 2 for 14 from the field and score seven total points in 65 minutes in the loss to Clemson. If either one has even an average game, then Carolina owns both in-state bragging rights and a huge resume win heading into 2017.

Let’s talk more about that resume. The Gamecocks currently have an RPI of 24, but that can be expected to drop with a game against Division-II Lander and the start of SEC play on the horizon. The wins over Michigan and Syracuse no longer shine as brightly as they did in November, and there are just two ranked teams — Kentucky and Florida — remaining on USC’s schedule. This means that even if Thornwell returns and is the same player he was five weeks ago, the Gamecocks have a razor-thin margin for error when they go up against the same middle- and lower-tier teams from their conference that ultimately kept them out of the NCAA Tournament a year ago.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 43 years since South Carolina last claimed a victory in the Big Dance. It’s equally difficult to fathom that the program has only been victorious in two tournaments ever (1972 and 1973).

Frank Martin has done a masterful job at assembling the pieces necessary to re-write this history and put USC in a position to finally taste postseason success again. But if the Gamecocks don’t pick themselves up and quickly and learn from the mistakes of last winter, then it will be their most recent bit of history that gets copied and pasted for all to see this March.