Ah, the joys of being a spoiler.

You get the chance to upset another team’s apple cart by beating them, possibly destroying their championship hopes in the process. Sometimes, you can actually ruin an opponent’s entire season.

Unfortunately, being a spoiler is not a role South Carolina or Clemson wants. Still, it’s one both the Gamecocks and Tigers are now stuck with.

How disheartening this must be for USC and Steve Spurrier. Three losses, all in the SEC and all by one touchdown. Play the woulda, coulda, shoulda game and it’s easy to point to a play here or a mistake there that would have the Gamecocks unbeaten, ranked in the top 5 and alone atop their division.

Yet Carolina stands at 5-3, with no chance of winning the SEC East and no chance of giving the school its first SEC crown and only second conference championship in more than 100 years of football.

This isn’t to say Spurrier and company can’t wind up with a good season because they can. Surely this is a club that can do better than last year’s six-win effort, one that made the squad bowl-eligible but not bowl-worthy.

However, the only real impact the Gamecocks will have in the league is if they upset Florida on Nov. 15. A win there and it might prevent the Gators from making a trip to Atlanta in December.

Thus, USC would be the spoiler.

For Clemson, being a spoiler really stings.

A season that began with such high hopes deteriorated quickly and got even worse with a coaching change at midseason.

A loss to Wake Forest, while Tommy Bowden was still coach, handed the team a critical blow in its quest to earn a berth in the ACC Championship Game in Tampa.

A loss to Georgia Tech, under interim boss Dabo Swinney, made that goal an impossibility.

Now sitting at 3-4, the Tigers are struggling just to register a winning season. Landing a spot in the postseason would amount to a small victory for a program that had to readjust its goals dramatically.

And the upcoming back-to-back games against Boston College and Florida State?

Clemson will try to play the spoiler.

When the Gamecocks and Tigers hook up at Memorial Stadium in November it could very well be the final contest of the season for one or both teams. There’ll be plenty of buzz among the partisan fans leading up to it — there always is — but from a national standpoint the game will be meaningless.

Instead, it’ll simply be a battle for bragging rights. Nothing wrong with that, but I’m guessing neither school was eyeing this one as a consolation prize at the beginning of the year.

And they certainly didn’t expect to be tagged as spoilers with so much football left to be played.