The Tank Job of the Week is South Carolina, and it isn't close, because this is the only collapse on the board that comes with a rerun button.
In Week 5, the Gamecocks led Kentucky 17-0 at home and lost 35-34 in overtime. That drops them to 2-3 overall and 0-3 in the SEC. Two weeks earlier, at the same stadium, they blew a 16-point second-quarter lead and lost 41-34 to Mississippi State. Back-to-back home games, back-to-back leads waved through like a valet. Under Shane Beamer, seven double-digit leads have now evaporated into losses. That's who this team is now.
Look at the competition and you see why South Carolina clears it. UCF built a 17-0 lead at No. 20 Houston and lost 27-17, giving up 27 unanswered points in the second half for an eleventh straight road loss. That's ugly, but it's one team gagging in one building, one time. Colorado State got buried 56-26 by Oregon State, with Braden Atkinson throwing five touchdown passes at them. That's a blowout, a different crime than a tank job. You can't blow a lead you never had. And Montana State, the top-ranked team in FCS, lost 35-34 to Idaho on a final-play two-point conversion that ended a 19-game winning streak. Brutal, but a buzzer-beater loss is bad luck as much as bad football.
South Carolina is the only one of them that keeps building its own demise every week, with the same architect.
The case for letting the Gamecocks off the hook goes like this: at least they fought. They traded leads in the second half, pushed it to overtime, didn't just lie down the way a team getting steamrolled does. A team that quietly folds with no response, the thinking goes, is the real tank job.
I'd flip that. A team that gets run off the field was simply worse that day. A team good enough to lead by 17 at home, good enough to answer, and still finds a way to lose in overtime has a problem that lives above the roster: coaching, late-game management, situational calls, a locker room that's learned leads don't hold here. Seven times now. Beamer owns every one of them.
This is now a pattern with a death toll attached: eight straight SEC losses. Beamer's own postgame summed it up without a trace of excuse. "Congratulations to Kentucky. They made the plays there at the end of the game." He's not wrong. The problem is that "they made the plays at the end" has become the standing weekly report at Williams-Brice, and the one constant in all of it wears a headset and a garnet pullover.
Colorado State got embarrassed, UCF got outscored, Montana State got caught. South Carolina got exposed, and that one happens on purpose by accident every single Saturday. Hand Shane Beamer the trophy, then ask South Carolina how many more of these it plans to sit through before someone takes it off him.
