Scott has followed South Carolina athletics for over 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter (this email) year-round and a column during football season that's published each Monday on GamecockCentral.com.
Scott Davis: Make or Break in Year Two?
Less than two years ago, it seemed like the future was bright for South Carolina baseball.
And that bright future, we wanted to believe, was the near future – not some faraway, mythical tomorrow way off in the distance, but a future that would arrive as early as the 2025 baseball season.
When Gamecock legend Ray Tanner – in one of his last major acts as South Carolina's athletics director – plucked former LSU skipper Paul Mainieri out of retirement to resurrect the baseball program in June 2024, most of us were optimistic we'd get an exhilarating five- or six-year run out of the coach.
Mainieri had won the College World Series in Baton Rouge to go along with four SEC titles, and by stepping back into the dugout at Founders Park, he immediately became the winningest active head coach in college baseball. True, he'd be 67 when his first team took the field for the 2025 season, so he wasn't the long-term solution in Columbia.
But surely he'd be the guy to finally get this once-proud program back to Omaha after a nearly 15-year drought before handing the reins over to a younger superstar coach, right?
Just 20 months after Mainieri's arrival, there is a stark difference in the mood and the vibe surrounding the team, which kicks off the 2026 season today with a doubleheader against Northern Kentucky. The 2025 campaign was one of the most humbling in the program's long history, as the Gamecocks collapsed to a 28-29 overall record and a startling 6-24 in conference play.
It suddenly seemed like we couldn't find Omaha with the help of Waze, Google Maps and MapQuest combined.
Mainieri is now the third coach since Tanner's retirement to take a crack at reviving what was once the most elite program in the sport.
And in Year Two of the Mainieri Era, it already feels like we're at "make or break" time.
Season to Forget
Just about everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong for South Carolina baseball in 2025.
Other than hapless Missouri, the once-dominant Gamecocks were the SEC's worst program, finishing 15th in a 16-team league. Even the most optimistic fan would have struggled to find bright spots during that disastrous season.
You couldn't point to one glaring weakness as the place to start a repair job. That's because everything seemed like a weakness. South Carolina struggled on the mound and at the plate – the team's challenges genuinely seemed to be everywhere you looked.
Leadership seemed to be lacking, too. Following the season, reports began to trickle out about morale on the roster having plummeted during the long year. Mainieri – who seemed to lack the warm and fuzzy characteristics that have helped coaches like Shane Beamer weather the down times – didn't help himself with a few curious comments throughout the season, including his statement that he had "underestimated the strength of the conference" a mere four years after he'd been LSU's coach.
The coach also indicated he wanted an opportunity to overhaul the roster after the 2025 debacle, and that certainly happened.
South Carolina will introduce 27 new players when it takes the field today, many of whom arrived via the transfer portal.
In Year Two, Mainieri will be playing with his guys, with a roster of his making. The transfer portal allows for such quick transformations, so if you weren't crazy about the team you inherited, you can make it your own faster than ever.
But it also means there will be no one to blame if the improvement doesn't come.
That's why it feels like we're already at a crossroads.
Expectations Have Changed
When Tanner handed the keys to the program to Chad Holbrook following a glorious run that included two national championships and six trips to the College World Series, Gamecock fans expected the excellence to continue unabated.
Indeed, many of us groused when Holbrook didn't instantaneously deliver appearances in Omaha, and he was fired after five seasons in which he made two Super Regional appearances.
A decade later, his 81-67 career record in the SEC now appears positively robust and almost superhuman to fans of a program that went 6-24 in the league last year.
Expectations, sadly, have changed here.
The program certainly no longer commands anything resembling the level of national respect it received during the Tanner years: South Carolina has long since ceased to be considered an elite college baseball operation.
Indeed, the Gamecocks were picked to finish right where they finished last year – 15th out of 16 teams – in the recent preseason SEC coaches poll. It's hard to imagine Mainieri surviving to coach a third season in Columbia should such a finish actually come to pass.
Of course, the good news is that the coach took his second LSU team to the College World Series after it had struggled to a losing league record in his first season. By his third year in Baton Rouge, the Tigers won the national championship.
There's precedent for dramatic turnarounds involving this coach in this league.
But expectations have changed so powerfully at South Carolina that such a remarkable improvement almost feels unimaginable to many of us as the new season dawns.
The last decade of South Carolina baseball has been one of slow, steady, incremental and unmistakable decline.
If Mainieri is going to be the man to change that, he'll have to do it quickly and emphatically.
And the rest of us will start finding out if that's a possibility today.
Tell me how you feel about the prospects for the 2026 baseball season by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com. (Please do not reply to this email.)
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