The hedges are ‘toast:’ South Carolina surveys damage from Williams-Brice field storming

Tim Flanagan was at Williams-Brice Stadium past 3 a.m. Sunday (4 a.m. if the clocks didn’t fall back), surveying the damage.

He stared at what were once his magnificent hedges. Those beautiful Ligustrums were all gone. It was as if a tornado had swept through. Leaves were everywhere. Luscious bushes were reduced to a pile of sticks. Scurrying through the rubble, random stuff kept appearing. Single shoes. Sunglasses. Aquaphor. Wallets. Phones.

“It essentially looked like what a festival area would look like,” said Flanagan, South Carolina’s head groundskeeper. “The bushes on the student section side are toast. … The bushes on the south end zone, there’s some holes there but they’re fine.”

It was natural-disaster scene created by football euphoria.

The hedge-hoppers burst over the bushes and onto the turf just as the clock hit zero on South Carolina’s 44-20 upset victory over No. 10 Texas A&M. As the scene unfolded, Flanagan and his crew had no time to worry about leaves or branches.

As they do for every game — whether its a 20-point loss or a monumental victory — the grounds crew is responsible for lowering the goal posts to no fans climb on them or attempt to carry them to the Congaree River.

So they just had to watch as 30,000 or more fans toppled into, onto and through those beautiful hedges. The university was fined $250,000 by the SEC for violating the league’s “access to competition area policy.”

After everyone finally cleared off the field, Flanagan was less concerned with the bushes than he was with the field. For as much as everyone cares about the hedges, the game’s played on the grass. That’s the important part.

“All in all, it did get trampled, so we’re gonna have a lot more leaf-tissue damage then we would during a game,” Flanagan said. “I don’t see any sodding needs as of (Sunday). ... I thought I was going to have to replace the (midfield) ‘Block C’ logo.”

During his postgame inspection, Flanagan noticed some interesting things with the grass. Inside one of the palmetto tree logos, there was a softball-sized hole in the ground. It looked like someone took a pocket knife and dug out a chunk of the Willy-B field for their memories.

Then he got to the midfield logo. All the garnet and black paint was gone.

“Why does it look like dirt?” Flanagan wondered.

It turns out, fans gathered at the logo after the game and were rubbing their white rally towels in the mid-field paint, staining them garnet to take a piece of the night home with them. Even Flanagan was amazed by the creativity.

“It was a great idea,” he said.

And who could blame the fans for soaking in the night.

Saturday was the first time South Carolina had a field storming since 2022, when the Gamecocks hung 63 points on No. 5 Tennessee. But, if you remember, that was USC’s final home game of the season. The damage didn’t matter much. Flanagan and his crew had six months to fix and regrow things.

This time will be a little different. The Gamecocks return to Williams-Brice Stadium to host Missouri in just two weeks.

As far as the grass is concerned, it’ll likely look sublime on Nov. 16. Flanagan and his crew are the best in the business.

Worried about soil compaction with the amount of shoes that were trampling around, the Gamecocks ground crew will begin aerating the grass by poking thousands of holes in the ground.

Once they do that and maybe throw some in extra seed, Flanagan said, the field will rejuvenate.

“It’s like you’re giving a shot in the arm of adrenaline,” he said. “I’ve got a plan.”

As for the hedges? That’s a different story.

For one, the Ligustrum plants used for the hedges are “not cheap,” Flanagan said. They’re large plants that have matured for years at nurseries, delivered with the roots wrapped in big, burlap sacks.

South Carolina has the manpower to install new hedges in two weeks, but they might not have the actual hedges. “The growing season’s over,” Flanagan said.

There aren’t many places with the amount of mature Ligustrums that South Carolina would need to make it look like nothing happened.

So what do they do?

For one, those hedges covered up metal railings, so South Carolina will have to pad the back of the end zone for player safety purposes. As for aesthetics, Flanagan said, it will ultimately be up to the administration how to proceed, but there are a couple of options.

“We’re gonna have to get creative on this,” he said.

They could “slap lipstick on a pig,” Flanagan said and throw down a bevy of much smaller plants to give it the stadium a similar feel. They could just rip out all the dead shrubs and install the padding and call it a day.

Or, perhaps, they just leave it as is. Tornado scene and all. A reminder for all of what happened on Saturday.