When the chips were down, the superstars stepped up.
After blowing a 21-6 lead against Missouri with a nightmare second half, South Carolina football found one late answer to re-take the lead, and do so with its two best players.
With the ball at the Missouri 15-yard-line in the final seconds, an agonized Williams-Brice Stadium crowd watched LaNorris Sellers complete a shovel pass to Rocket Sanders, and the star running back did the rest with a bobbing and weaving run over the goal line.
It was the fourth — and final — lead change of a frenetic last five minutes and change, the last note of an instant classic at Williams-Brice Stadium as No. 21 South Carolina beat No. 23 Missouri 34-30, snapping its five-game losing streak against the Tigers in the most dramatic way possible.
Missouri (7-3, 3-3 SEC) had taken the lead thanks to its own superstars just moments earlier when Brady Cook connected with Luther Burden III on a fourth-and-5 touchdown pass from 37 yards out, driving a dagger into the hearts of South Carolina (7-3, 5-3 SEC) fans after the home team blew a 21-6 halftime lead.
But Sellers and the offense answered with a masterful drive, doing exactly what it could not in close losses earlier in the season: answer the bell and follow it with a stop. Sellers hit Jared Brown and Daleveon Campbell for key passes to set it up, before hitting Rocket on the shovel pass heard ‘round Columbia.
South Carolina’s defense found one final stop in the closing seconds when Jalon Kilgore intercepted an errant Cook pass over the middle, and the Gamecocks prevailed with the win of their season, and one of the best wins of the Shane Beamer era. The win also clinched Beamer’s first SEC-winning season at South Carolina and the program’s first since 2017.
Missouri erased the initial 15-point deficit mostly thanks to running back Nate Noel, who became the first player to rush for over 100 yards against the Gamecocks this season and had the mark before the end of the third quarter. The South Carolina spiral started when a 3rd quarter fourth-and-4 attempt fell incomplete, and the Tigers ripped off a drive the other way to find their first touchdown of the night.
There were warning shots earlier — Missouri had two 10-play, 57-yard drives that ended in field goals plus another long drive which ended in a missed field goal.
But as the South Carolina offense fizzled in the second half following a hot three-touchdown first half, Missouri’s ground-and-pound scheme started to take a toll on the Gamecock defense. Creases opened up, Noel found them, and hands on hips were apparent all over the defensive line.
When quarterback Brady Cook connected with Marquis Johnson for a gain of 49 yards over the top, it set up Noel for a one-yard touchdown run which with the ensuing extra point, gave Missouri the lead.
That was the first of the four fourth-quarter lead changes, and the second came after Sellers connected with fellow freshman Michael Smith on a five-yard pass. It was the second time you could reasonably think someone just picked up the game-winning score, and there were still over five minutes left.
Then came the Cook and Burden show, which looked like enough to get Missouri out of jail after its poor first half.
But not against Sellers and Sanders, though.
No Missouri misery this time.
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