Top 10 Pennsylvania sports stories in 2025: From Eagles Super Bowl to Penn State changes

COLUMBIA — Gamecock Nation can’t wait for that ball to drop.
The start of 2026 will officially end 2025, when South Carolina’s most visible and lucrative sports — football, men’s basketball and baseball — each took their turn dropping balls and wins in perhaps the most dreadful “Big Three” calendar year the athletic program has ever had.
It isn’t cherry-picking bad results, and it isn’t ignoring the Gamecocks’ tremendously fruitful women’s sports program. The spring was amazing for the USC women, with Dawn Staley’s basketball team reaching its fifth straight Final Four and Ashley Chastain Woodard’s softball team, in her first season, coming within three outs of the Women’s College World Series.
It’s just that two programs — football and men’s basketball — carry the financial load for the athletic department as almost always the only two teams at the school to earn a profit. Baseball for decades was the men’s sport that would almost always win so much that it would ease the suffering from dreary football and men’s basketball seasons during the school year.
Those three teams were comically bad in 2025, notching a combined record of 10-54 against Power Four competition. Men’s basketball and baseball finished last in the SEC; football finished next-to-last.
Athletic director Jeremiah Donati will celebrate his one-year anniversary of his first official day of work on Jan. 2, and as he prepares to start a future where athletes are paid through revenue share, he has to be grateful that 2025 is over. He’s already spoken of his optimism for baseball.
But after replacing much of the roster that played the worst season in USC baseball history, is a turnaround likely?
“Yeah, it was a tough year. I’m not used to these kinds of seasons, quite frankly,” coach Paul Mainieri said after his disastrous first year. “I think the future is bright for our program, and like I said, I’m disappointed about this year — I’m not discouraged about the future. We’re just going to keep rolling up our sleeves and working hard at it.”
The hire was viewed as a coup for former AD Ray Tanner, once the leader of the nation’s best baseball program but then in his last few months as head of the entire athletic department. It isn’t like Mark Kingston’s last team was a world-beater, but it did enough to reach what should be the bare minimum for any USC team — an NCAA Regional.
Yet Mainieri’s first team needed a telescope to see the postseason. The Gamecocks were a miserable 6-24 in SEC play, with a 25th loss coming in the SEC Tournament, and went 0-4 against the other “name” schools on their schedule.
That season began as men’s basketball was ending a horrendous 12-20 season (2-16 SEC, with a 17th loss in the SEC Tournament). What made that one really sting was it was one season removed from a 26-win year that tied the school record for single-season victories and finished in the NCAA Tournament.
“This is a really good team,” an exasperated coach Lamont Paris said after his final game. “We just couldn’t figure out late-game situations. Especially in away games.”
Perhaps he was just a bit upset. It was late-game situations in home games that killed the Gamecocks. USC lost five home games by five or less points, plus one more on the road and another at the SEC Tournament.
The school year ended, but the calendar year wasn’t done. The Gamecocks’ football team was one of the national media’s darlings, coming off a 9-4 season and returning star quarterback LaNorris Sellers. Confidence soared.
USC went 4-8. Two wins were against Group of Six opponents. Two more were against teams that fired their coaches. The Gamecocks went 2-8 against Power Four teams with three — Missouri, LSU, Clemson — the coulda-woulda-shoulda kind of losses where a win appeared obtainable.
Two more — Alabama and Texas A&M — were wins that were sewn up and the Gamecocks just blew it.
“We’re going through this right now, and I hurt. But we’re going to be stronger for it next season. I know that,” mourned coach Shane Beamer after coughing up a 30-3 halftime lead in College Station. “I don’t know why we’re going through it. I don’t know why we’ve had this heartbreak that we’ve had.”