How South Carolina basketball became the talk of the NCAA tournament

To be fair, South Carolina was a topic of conversation when the NCAA tournament bracket was revealed two Sundays ago.

No, the Gamecocks weren’t discussed as a team that could potentially take down Vegas favorite Duke and ultimately emerge as the champions of the East Region. Why would they have been? We’re talking about a team that entered the Big Dance having lost five of its last seven games. Playing in a conference that had spent the bulk of the previous four months serving as little more than the butt of jokes also didn’t do anything to help the team’s perception.

When South Carolina popped up as a No. 7 seed on Selection Sunday, yes, it elicited a response ... about the Gamecocks potentially being the most over-seeded team in the tournament. There was some thought that they had a puncher’s chance in round one against equally unappealing Marquette, but with red-hot Duke waiting two days later, what did it matter? The program winning a game in the Big Dance for the first time in 43 years would be a nice first week story.

By now you know that the Gamecocks did get that first tournament win since 1973. You know that they ripped Duke a couple of days later to score March’s maddest moment up to that point. You know that Sindarius Thornwell has gone from “the guy with the funny name who’s actually pretty good” to the player who has outshone all others for two weeks. And you now know that South Carolina is headed to the Final Four for the first time ever.

Regardless of which team represents the East Region in Phoenix, the setup for the final weekend of the tournament is now set in stone. This is the bizarro Final Four, with one familiar face thrown into the fray just to keep up appearances.

Despite its status as a No. 1 seed that’s been as much of a March Madness fixture as any other team for the past two decades, in the eyes of many, Gonzaga is still a mid-major program taking the big stage for the first time. Oregon hails from a power conference, but the Ducks are making their first appearance in a national semifinal since winning the very first NCAA tournament all the way back in 1939. North Carolina and Kentucky have both been here more times than anybody can remember, and one of them will be labeled all next week as the overwhelming favorite to cut down the nets.

And then there’s South Carolina, the major conference team with NBA talent and a well-respected coach that will still be playing the role of Cinderella for at least one more game. Even if it’s a role that isn’t unfair. After all, we’re talking about a program that had only won games in two NCAA tournaments ever before this one, and a seven seed that looked abysmal in the final three weeks of the regular season.

Maybe that’s the biggest surprise of all: The fact that this South Carolina could continue its recent trend of starting hot then getting cold, but somehow finding a way to right the ship this time.

A season ago, South Carolina remained unbeaten longer than any team in the country but one. Part of that was a talented team playing for a talented coach, but another part was an unforgivably easy non-conference schedule. When the bottom dropped out on the Gamecocks, it dropped all the way out. They lost seven games in the SEC and wound up on the wrong side of the NCAA tournament bubble.

Believing that his team’s super-light early schedule the season before had done more harm than good, Frank 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 another pair of major conference opponents 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.

What that schedule did was put in place a safety net that would catch the Gamecocks if something like Thornwell being unavailable were to take place. When it did (via suspension), and South Carolina went just 3-3 in his absence, it wasn’t a brutal stroke of bad luck that doomed USC to miss out on the dance once again.

Martin’s ability to learn and adjust isn’t limited to scheduling. He turned the Gamecocks into one of the toughest man-to-man defense teams in the country, but against teams with questionable outside shooting (Baylor) and lightning quick guards (Florida), he wasn’t afraid to swallow his pride and go zone. He also allowed Thornwell to climb back out of the doghouse after his suspension, and got back to centering USC’s offense around its most versatile player. The result was Thornwell becoming the SEC Player of the Year, and ultimately the most dynamic player in the entire country in March.

The result has also been that the whole country is now talking about South Carolina basketball. The same could be said two weeks ago, but the topic was much, much different.