The bowl matchups were announced early on Sunday evening with the Gator Bowl and Holiday Bowl battling it out for the right to feature Notre Dame football. In the end, the Gator Bowl won out with the Fighting Irish set to face one of the nation’s hottest teams in South Carolina.
Here are some facts for the upcoming matchup.
- The game will be played on Friday, December 30th at 3:30 PM ET.
- ESPN will televise the game.
- The bowl is hosted at TIAA Bank Field in Jacksonville, Florida home to the Jacksonville Jaguars.
- The Gator Bowl is officially sponsored by TaxSlayer.
- This will be Notre Dame’s 4th appearance in the Gator Bowl. The Irish beat Penn State in 1976, lost to Georgia Tech in 1998, and lost to NC State in 2002.
- Following conference championship weekend, South Carolina is ranked 34th according to FEI with the 50th rated offense and 57th rated defense.
- South Carolina’s offense averages 6.01 yards per play (Notre Dame’s offense averages 5.81 YPP) while the Gamecocks defense allows 5.56 yards per play (the Irish allow 5.17 YPP).
- Notre Dame has faced South Carolina 4 times in history. The Irish won in Columbia in 1976 and 1983, and split the games in South Bend in 1979 (win) and 1984 (loss).
- South Carolina comes into the game on fire with recent wins over #6 Tennessee (63-38) and #7 Clemson (31-30) to conclude the regular season.
- The Gamecocks finished 3rd in the SEC East division with a 4-4 record.
Quarterback Spencer Rattler was the no. 1 overall quarterback in the 2019 class.
- Former 5-star quarterback Spencer Rattler was signed by Lincoln Riley at Oklahoma and transferred to South Carolina after making 17 starts for the Sooners in 2020-21. Rattler’s 2022 was pretty disappointing but he did throw for 798 yards and 8 touchdowns in their last 2 regular season wins.
- Redshirt junior corner Cam Smith is widely considered to be a 1st round pick and declared for the NFL Draft following South Carolina’s win against Clemson. He will not be playing in the Gator Bowl.
- Shane Beamer, son of legendary Virginia Tech head coach Frank Beamer, leads South Carolina and is finishing his 2nd season with the Gamecocks. So far, Beamer is 15-10 with the program.
- Former Notre Dame head coach Lou Holtz coached at South Carolina from 1999 to 2004. Will he be in attendance?
See you in Jacksonville in a few weeks!
As a lifelong ND fan who attends the University of South Carolina this is really funny lol.
I’m gonna be there in Jacksonville and between injuries and opt outs as well as South Carolina’s inability to stop the run, protect Rattler, and hang on to the ball I feel like no matter who is under center for ND it’s gonna be a big day for the Irish
USC’s rushing defense gives up an average of 200 yds per game. Against FBS competition, their offense gives up 2.55 sacks per game and 7.55 tackles for loss per game (last in the SEC). Yet they finished third in the SEC East. They only scored 10 pts vs Missouri.
Oregon would have been a better matchup in the Holiday Bowl, though reporting suggested their was a “Battle Royale” between the two bowls. NC at 9-4 will play Oregon (-10.5). We were within a game of NC and beat them. Nix will play. Gonzalez and D.J. Johnson, their Edge rusher who leads them in sacks and with 8.5 tackles for loss will not. I expect Noah Sewell will too, especially since his brother Nephi at Utah has.
All Pac 12 teams are favored except Washington vs Texas.
the mizzou and florida games were so horrifically awful
I figure it won’t matter who is under center for ND as Estime Diggs and Tyree just light up the scoreboard
This is a scary matchup considering they beat Clemson and Tennessee putting up huge number of points (and considering that we’ll be without Mayer and probably Foskey). Will S.C. have any pro prospects that won’t play?
Well that’ll be helpful! I didn’t realize they had a 1st rd WR. Makes more sense how they were able to torch Clemson and Tennessee.
He’s their corner, so it won’t help us much…assuming we RTDB the entire game.
o my bad. Not sure how I read “corner” to mean WR. Maybe Eric edited that comment?
starting DL Zacch Pickens also declared for the draft
TE Austin Stogner (who followed Rattler from OU) entered the transfer portal today as well
Jaheim Bell just entered the transfer portal as well
very very good TE but misused by SCar this season (was hyped up alongside Mayer and Bowers preseason as one of the best in CFB)
now South Carolina has like 1 TE for the bowl game
Conditional on us not making a playoff/major bowl, this is absolutely good and rules:
For scheduling purposes this is the best case scenario.
Also, all the potential matchups would have been pretty cool:
Holiday Bowl vs. Oregon
Cheez Its Bowl vs Oklahoma
ReliaQuest, I guess was out, but vs Miss St
All would have been pretty solid games for Notre Dame. Given that Pyne is gone, I like the prospects of South Carolina the best
I thought the Mayo Bowl against an SEC opponent was also on the table. Worst case, get matched up against LSU and see CBK get doused in Mayo.
Not set in stone yet but possible my wife will be induced or have a c-section that weekend, possibly on the 30th. Could be a wild weekend for me
Godspeed.
Will Rattler play? I know he’s been uneven but my gut feeling is there’s probably at least a few NFL teams having internal slack chats about his upside. What sayeth 18S?
He is going to play
Yeah he needs to put more good film out there. There’s maaaaaybe a shot he goes to the draft with a stellar performance against ND, but I think given the strength of this qb draft class and rattler’s current rep he is back at South Carolina for another year
Just a heads up, Rakes Report’s seventh annual Christmas Giving fundraiser is back, if any of you chuckle-fudgers want to do something nice:
https://gofund.me/64b5ac2b
Looks pretty even. We can win the Palmetto Cup with a win.
Will pair nicely with the ACC Championship trophy.
Honorary Sandlappers.
Sounds like Angeli, Buchner, and Powlus are all taking reps in practice. I would think that narrows down to Buchner and Angeli the closer we get to the bowl game.
See a lot of projections for Brennan Armstrong to ND. 2022 wasn’t the greatest year for him, but showed steady improvement upto then. looking at his stats, i do wonder if he can throw the deep ball. I know Kelly had good things to say about him before our game vs VA a couple years ago. (But that is pretty typical).
Yeah, if you get the chance to watch his 2021 highlights, there are plenty of throws where the ball is in the air 40+ yards and on the money. Can’t tell if it’s just being left-handed but his throws look like more touch than pure arm power so it looks kinda weird to the eye, but he’s still making all the throws and getting the ball down the field well.
2022, I don’t know what happened there, change in HC and OC and UVA in general was totally lost this year – even before the tragedy. Not sure how much of the blame goes to the QB, their issues started a little higher with the surprising news that Bronco M. was ditching them.
But just about any transfer QB is going to have some sort of issue/baggage coming with him. I think at worst Armstrong is a Coan-caliber type of QB (just faster, though prob. less accurate).
I saw that Freeman said any of them could play. But, Powlus can’t be getting more than like 1 rep and only during individuals.
Devin Leary also entering portal. Looked really good before injury, although a pec tear has to be a hard injury for a QB to come back from.
Phil Jurkovec is teaming up with Pat Narduzzi to write his anit-Notre Dame Instagram post next season.
does pitt have a song nd can play before the game to activate his winter soldier powers
247 showing that McCullough’s kid is in the portal. He had a hell of a freshman season. Anyone hearing of mutual interest?
A few schools being tossed around including Ohio State (makes sense) and Oklahoma (uh, ok). Sounds like ND will try to get in on him but we’ll see.
Any chance ND transfer rules are getting in the way?
Any chance ND transfer rules wouldn’t get in the way?
Point taken, but Notre Dame did just offer an Iowa sophomore WR who is def not a graduate but in the portal that they liked a lot coming out of HS.
Obviously the flood gates aren’t open, but I’d like to hope for kids they tried to recruit in HS and know a bit (and know were at least in the % of kids with the course work/ability to gain entry in the first place), maybe they can work more undergrad transfers through.
The word we’re seeing about McCullough is “a lot of factors in play here”, which is usually People Who Know Things-ese for the academic stuff isn’t going to work out.
I looked at that too, unfortunately I didn’t see good news on that front. 247 has him with eyes on Oklahoma, there is a family connection with an OU assistant who was on the staff with McCullough when they worked for the Chiefs. Also some talk that the 2023 McCullough (safety Daeh) will flip his verbal from Cincy over to OU pretty soon. Notre Dame wasn’t even mentioned in the article, but six other names were, mostly southern types (Tenn, FSU, Auburn, Texas, etc). Doesn’t seem like there is much pull for the kids having Notre Dame interest, which is a bummer.
Given how big the transfer portal is now, is there any data from what happened last year in terms of how many players transferred and (what I’m most interested in) how many players were left with no place to go/no scholarship? I’m wondering how many players are left with no seat when the song stops playing so to speak in this game of musical chairs. I bet it’s a lot and I wonder if the transfer pace will slow down when it becomes more known (which I would imagine would take like 5 years for it to slow down if indeed this kind of thing is a real problem for some athletes).
Judging by the 247 transfer portal tracker it seems like well over half of kids didn’t find a home going into 2022.
Wow, this seems particularly underreported. What happens to these guys then? I wonder if they’ll catch on the next year or if most/all of them are just done with football and maybe done with college then too.
It seems like it would be wise to either (a) set up a destination before entering the portal or (b) think twice (or three times) before leaving realizing that you might just not end up with a scholarship anywhere next year.
I wonder what the transfer rate is for ND players. Do all former ND transfers get a scholarship somewhere?
This is a great topic, and a great question about ND players in comparison.
Yeah, it’s very interesting. The 247 data doesn’t capture the whole picture, Paul Moala went to FCS Idaho and that wasn’t tracked I guess since he went down a level. Same with JoJo Johnson who ended up at a junior college and is getting D1 offers for next year.
So I highly doubt that 50%+ of transfer portal kids didn’t “find a home”, their new stop just might not have been a D1 program.
And as mentioned, I guess the ND distinction of being guaranteed a spot for four years and not just having a renewable one year scholarship makes things different, but I’m sure it’s not like JoJo Johnson thought he’d get a starting gig in the SEC this year.
He surely had to understand that the portal would be a long journey to the bottom to prove himself on the field and go back up. He could have stayed at ND and (probably) never made the two deep and got a good degree, but football player kids have different priorities and aspirations than how a blog reader would approach the situation.
That’s helpful context that these D1 players may have ended up at some other non D1 school and so weren’t being counted.
I guess I would figure an ND transfer might think he’d drop down a level (low-end power 5 conference teams to high end non-power 5 teams) but not necessarily two or three levels.
E.g. just saw the Bellamy got a CB to Rutgers.
Maybe, maybe not, I’m sure it has to vary on a case by case basis. If you’re a 3-star like Johnson without much an offer list from HS, no college tape and maybe not many connections/relationships with other programs, the floor can be pretty low.
I can’t speak for him or invent where he might have thought he would end up, but I believe these kids are fairly self aware and know where they fit in the pecking order. He had to expect it could be a long trek to get back.
Ending up at a juco could suggest he needed to get his grades up in order to get into a D1 school as well. Which I should make clear that I don’t know for sure, but it makes some sense that maybe his ND days put him a little behind, which is something else that doesn’t always get considered on the internet as a potential reason to leave if a person wasn’t fitting in or sinking academically, they might enter the portal as a way to not fall further in a hole at the school they’re in and look for a fresh start.
A lot of these kids wouldn’t have been invited back to their own school anyway. Scholarships are 1 year guarantees. ND is unique in that it promises a degree if the kid sticks it out. Most other schools don’t. This was kind of a big issue like 10 years ago (I think when amateurism starting coming up). Basically like half of kids don’t graduate and the “value” of a scholarship for 2 years, while not attending class, is essentially nothing, so it was a bunch of bull acting like they were being compensated in some fair way.
That said. The question here (how many kids never play again) should be reflected in graduation rates. A player only disappears from your graduation rate denominator if they transfer in good standing to another school. But nothing has changed in the past decade. No one cares what happens to these kids.
But there’s still a lot more transferring going on, no? So there must be some significant increase of kids who are leaving with sight set on greener pastures that would have been taken back (whether the team fully wanted to take them back or not), no?
Or is it just that teams now can shed scholarship players faster because they can replace them faster through the portal? Whereas before they couldn’t replace guys so quickly so they couldn’t let too many guys leave?
I saw a tweet from Farmer that the first three years it hovered between 50-55%. Last year, it was 28%.
I read on ESPN that last year only 23% of players who entered the portal wound up with somewhere to go. That’s compared to 55% in 2019-20. The extra COVID year of eligibility is obviously having some impact
The new Stanford coach will contend with what? Seventeen Stanford players have entered the Transfer Portal, four may be declaring for the NFL draft, and seven more are Seniors or RS Seniors.
On the offensive side, McKee and Yurosek may enter the draft. Two starting WRs are Seniors. They may lose six offensive linemen – almost all starters.
On the defensive side, three starting linebackers as well as seven secondary players from their two deep. Their top 2023 committed recruit (Walker Lyons) just decommitted. And, if memory serves, those Stanford players in the Transfer Portal last year who did not get a scholarship elsewhere just moved on. Tough to get transfers due to admission criteria.
haha so the transfer portal may turn out to kill Stanford football.
So you’re saying we might be able to beat them next year?
Where’s the Kelly screaming emoji when you need it?
Think Tommy Brockermeyer is in the portal because he really wants to compete to play guard between Joe Alt and Zeke Correll next season?
Will always remember Holtz finally beating the buckeyes in the outback bowl, when he was at south Carolina. I recall his running back was ohio’s Mr football