Like his team, Rocket Sanders is going through November with something to prove

Among the seemingly infinite number of legal cases against the NCAA, Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia decided to get in on the trend and sue as well. Why not? Just kick ‘em when they’re down.

Pavia is essentially saying that his two years in junior college shouldn’t count, and he’s asking for two extra years of eligibility. And, well, maybe Rocket Sanders can throw a clause in there.

No, Sanders didn’t go to junior college, so that might hurt. But in the era of kids playing college as many as nine years, Sanders is a unicorn. His college career began in 2021. There’s no extra year because of COVID. No redshirt season. Just four years of football.

Maybe there’s an NCAA exemption for him somewhere out there. What seems more likely after Saturday, though, is that the NFL comes calling for the senior running back.

In South Carolina’s 28-7 win over Vanderbilt on Saturday, Sanders was the best offensive player on the field. He touched the ball 17 times, totaled 174 yards and scored touchdowns of 33, 1 and 43 yards.

That came just a week after he mauled the Texas A&M defense for 236 total yards and a pair of scores.

Somehow he’s put up almost as many total yards in the past two games as he has the rest of the season combined. It’s easy to point to his midseason injury as a culprit — and perhaps that’s part of it — but he played three games before getting nicked up and never looked this good.

It is almost hard to describe how good Sanders has been running the ball. It looks like he’s doing everything faster. Running faster. Cutting quicker. Everything. But the game seems so slow for him.

On that 33-yard touchdown, he ran into a hole with a Vanderbilt defender running toward the gap. Most running backs would try and bulldoze the guy. Maybe run full speed and break out of a tackle. Sanders basically jogged to the hole and cut right. The defender dove. Sanders cut back left, pushed down a black jersey and ran into green grass.

“When I see green grass, I’m like, ‘Man, lovely,’” Sanders said.

That’s not a play he would have made a month ago. So what changed?

“He really turned it on,” USC tight end Josh Simon said of Sanders. “He runs hard. He won’t be denied. He doesn’t go down.”

“He just kind of exploded out of nowhere,” said quarterback LaNorris Sellers, who threw for 238 yards Saturday on 14 completions. “We always knew he was good, but these past couple weeks he’s kind of turned it up a little bit.”

When asked about the difference between Sanders now and Sanders a month ago, head coach Shane Beamer cited the health, but he also gave credit to the team’s perimeter blocking. So often, the difference between a 6-yard gain and a 33-yard touchdown is how well the wide receivers or tight ends are blocking their guys.

Certainly, that played a part. But linebacker Demetrius Knight seemed to have another theory that goes back to the whole eligibility theme.

Barring some drastic shift in the eligibility rules, Sanders has just four games remaining in his college career. Four games to boost his NFL stock. Four more games to leave his mark.

In some ways, the story of Sanders and the story of South Carolina football are tied together. Both are trying to reclaim what they had in 2022: Sanders, a 1,443-yard rushing season; for the Gamecocks, an eight-win season.

As both entered November, the urgency set in. South Carolina has back-to-back wins over Top 25 teams and is now bowl eligible.

And Sanders’ stock is surging.

“He’s running with something to prove,” Knight said, talking about Sanders, then inherently shifting the answer to the whole team. “Of course the first half of the season didn’t go the way any of us wanted.

“But because of that, we found our identity.”