Stunned with nowhere to go, Steve Spurrier pulled his visor over his eyes as the final seconds bled off the game clock and revealed an ugly truth about his football team this season.

The Gamecocks are a mid-level SEC team, no longer made of championship material.

South Carolina’s nausea-inducing offensive performance — nine punts and five three-and-outs — was more than Spurrier could bear Saturday night at Williams-Brice Stadium during a game in which his defense had its best outing of the season.

This wasn’t like the easily forgettable beating Texas A&M handed out in August. It was much worse, a giveaway that resonated throughout Gamecock Nation and will linger throughout the season.

Five games in, the smoke cleared and inconsistency remained, a combination of shoddy defensive play, the lack of a running game and an underperforming offensive line.

South Carolina spent 69 consecutive weeks — dating back to September 2010 — in the Associated Press Top 25 before a disappointing loss to Mizzou spoiled the streak, a crippling setback that all but ended the Gamecocks’ shot at an Eastern Division championship this season.

Winning out with a sputtering offense in games at Auburn and Florida seems unlikely, as does getting to double-digit wins for the fourth consecutive season.

Before their current stretch of dominance, the Gamecocks were ranked 69 weeks total from the start of the 1980 season to 2009.

Spoiled by success, it’s time to re-evaluate this season’s goals.

Since winning their only division title in 2010, good fortune has seemed to follow the Gamecocks. Losses to bad teams that used to be indicative of a mediocre program were rare, South Carolina dominated on defense at home and star players made the momentum-changing plays necessary to win.

Those qualities no longer exist, at least not with this current team.

The Gamecocks have had 15 NFL Draft picks since 2012, the most in school history over a three-year span, but only two starters on this year’s team are locks to be selected in May — offensive linemen A.J. Cann and Corey Robinson.

One could argue that junior ballcarrier Mike Davis, a preseason Heisman candidate, this summer, isn’t even the best backfield option on his own team.

Like all narrow defeats in the SEC, quarterback play is scrutinized like no other and Dylan Thompson was the punching bag for internet fodder over the weekend.

How quickly fans forget that Thompson’s a player who waited four years for his shot and through four games, was on pace to set single-season records for yardage and touchdown passes. Thompson’s no Connor Shaw, but nothing he did pre-Mizzou gave us any inkling he could not deliver as a serviceable director of the offense.

Following the program’s all-time winningest quarterback is no easy feat and the fact the two passers are mirror opposites complicates the situation for the first-year starter.

South Carolina’s run game, its strength during Spurrier’s heyday in Columbia, isn’t effective without a rushing threat under center and that’s been proven this season, especially on third-and-short situations when teams have brought seven players to the line of scrimmage.

Better-suited as a play-action passer, Thompson’s rarely had the protection necessary to operate this fall and has been placed under tremendous pressure by a woeful defense to score points on every possession. Without his 13 total touchdowns over the first four games, it’s likely the Gamecocks would’ve been under .500 heading into the Mizzou game.

South Carolina’s win over Georgia masked several fatal flaws and caused a near instantaneous overreaction that this team still had the swagger of a preseason division favorite.

The ensuing outing against Vanderbilt was a more direct reflection of the 2014 Gamecocks, a team without an identity succumbing to the harsh reality of playing without a No. 1 pick, a top-flight quarterback and several other playmakers on defense.

Now that no opponent in the SEC considers South Carolina a threat as an unranked team, maybe the Gamecocks can follow the blueprint that made them formidable in recent years.

And considering how embarrassing the East has looked across the board compared to the super-division on the other side, perhaps South Carolina could channel some 2010 magic and reach Atlanta with three losses.