South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer said the Gamecocks were the better team on Saturday after his team’s 27-24 win over Tennessee.

“We won the football game in 2022 because we were the better team. … And we won the game tonight because we were the better football team,” said Beamer immediately after the win over the Vols.

Anyone who watched the game objectively, though, knows that Beamer’s comments aren’t accurate. The better team doesn’t always win — that’s why games aren’t played on paper — and that was the case on Saturday night.

Tennessee dominated 50 minutes of the game. The Vols did more than enough to win the game. But self-inflicted mistakes and ill-timed penalties (which were Tennessee’s fault, to be fair) essentially gifted South Carolina the opportunity to win the game.

Beamer and a lot of folks in Columbia probably don’t feel that way, but a lot of people in the national media, including ESPN’s Paul Finebaum, think Tennessee was the better team on Saturday night.

“Look at South Carolina on Saturday,” said Finebaum on McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning. “Tennessee was the better team. I think everybody watching the game knew that. They had so many opportunities at the end to win — they just couldn’t finish it out.”

This South Carolina loss is one that’s going to sting a while for Tennessee. A lot of things had to go wrong for Tennessee for South Carolina to have a chance to win the game. And unfortunately for the Vols, everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

But the people who look at more than box scores understand what happened on Saturday — Tennessee beat Tennessee.