I sort of understood South Carolina fans’ disappointment with Frank Martin, who simply never capitalized on the program’s surprise Final Four run in 2017. In the five years that followed, the Gamecocks went 75-73 and didn’t make it back to the NCAA Tournament. He did the work to get South Carolina out of the hole dug by the disastrous Darrin Horn hire, but the program had plateaued. The main selling point was a 41-47 SEC record over that stretch, and that was drug down by a disastrous 2020-21 when South Carolina got hit especially hard by COVID.
On the other hand, Lamont Paris’s first team returned almost no one of note.