When the University of South Carolina marching band won the 2025 EA Sports Metallica Collegiate Edition Marching Band Competition, Jaylen Hamilton wasn’t surprised. The junior hospitality major and sousaphone player was thrilled.
The competition selects a different college marching band every year to record a new arrangement of an iconic Metallica song for the next iteration of EA Sports popular College Football video game. The winning program also records a new version of the game’s theme song, “Campus Clash.”
“I have College Football 25. I have College Football 26,” says Hamilton. “So just thinking about, ‘Oh, I'm going to be in the next game, and I can actually hear us?’ I just, I don't know. It's very exciting.”
It was also a fitting coda. In fall 2025, the Carolina Band performed a halftime show that featured three adaptations of songs by the heavy metal legends: “Master of Puppets,” “Enter Sandman” and “Lux Aeterna.” Jay Jacobs, director of the Carolina Band, put together the Metallica program after several students expressed an interest in the EA Sports competition.
And the educational component was paramount. Over the summer, Jacobs approached graduate assistant Benjamin Pouncey about arranging a song that could subsequently be submitted. The two bounced around several possibilities and ultimately settled on “Enter Sandman,” one of Metallica’s most enduring hits.
“First and foremost, we think about the students,” says Pouncey. “We want to make sure we're creating something that's going to set them up for success and something that they're going to enjoy performing and bringing to life. Then we had to think about the arena that the Carolina Band performs in, the Williams-Brice gameday atmosphere.
“We wanted to make sure that we translated Metallica to marching band — or any original material to marching band — in a way that’s super effective.”
The effort paid off. The Oct. 18 halftime show was a hit with the fans at Williams-Brice, and the submission that came out of that afternoon’s performance was a hit with EA Sports and Metallica. Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo announced the Carolina Band as the Division I winners on Jan. 30.
Ultimately, the competition’s organizers asked Jacobs and company to record a different song for the video game, but that just provided another opportunity. This time, Jacobs tapped JD Shaw, an associate professor of horn and the band’s principal arranger, and Bailey Seabury, an instructor and arranger for the Carolina Band’s drumline.
Shaw jumped at the opportunity. He grew up listening to Metallica in the late 80s — “I was kind of a metalhead when I was a kid, and when The Black Album came out, that was life changing” — so he was already intimately familiar with the source material. The challenge was to create an arrangement that didn’t just follow the notes but captured the metal band’s heavy vibe and gritty sound.
“I mean, it would be hard to recreate James Hetfield's voice, to get to the true grittiness of it,” Shaw explains. “But some instruments sound just a little bit grittier than others. Trombones, for example, can get this heat on their sound. It's not the same grittiness as a voice — it's more a grittiness in terms of the instrumental color — but you can use that to approach that aesthetic. Or, a lot of metal bands use a lot of open fifths in the electric guitar, and you can kind of recreate that in a low brass.”
But Shaw is reluctant to get into the weeds, and he doesn’t want the spotlight aimed at him. Like Pouncey, he wants to make sure it’s the students who take the bow.
“I’m just a guy at a computer putting ink on the page. The real magic is the kids,” he says. “They're the performers. They're the ones that are connecting with this music. Obviously, Ben wrote a great arrangement of ‘Enter Sandman,’ but then it was the kids who really made the piece come alive.”
Fade to Garnet and Black
Winning the Metallica/EA Sports competition gave USC’s marching band some well-deserved exposure. It also earned the program $50,000. The real payoff, though, was felt by the students themselves, who marched onto the field at Williams-Brice ready to rock and then showed up at Colonial Life Arena a few months later ready to roll.
For the recording session, they sported branded black t-shirts — EA Sports College Football in the iconic Metallica font and USC’s Block C logo across the chest — and they took their spots on the hardcourt with single-minded purpose. Three drum majors mounted their podiums. It’s a cliché to say you could hear a pin drop, but you could hear a pin drop.
This was business as usual and anything but. The football season had been over for months and many of the musicians hadn’t seen each other all semester. Most of them knew there was a chance they might win the competition, but once they actually won —and once Jacobs and Shaw settled on a new piece — they had to learn the new arrangement on very short notice.
“The gravity of the situation — like, ‘This is our one opportunity to get this recording right’ — was definitely reflected across the entire band,” says drum major and chemical engineering senior Brayden Russell. “Everybody knows, when it's time to be serious we're locked in. That's the case for shows and football games as well. Everyone’s locked in as soon as they hear tap-offs.”
They ran through a few takes of “Campus Clash” — some partial, some complete — then tackled “Sad but True.” Shaw and the rest of the staff stood quietly in the wings. Between takes, Jacobs’ voice came over the PA with instructions, tweaks and quiet encouragement.
“Trumpets. You don't need to go full for these first two measures, because we're primarily doing it for the last three measures to get the last three bars really, really cooking.”
“Trombones. The sound is great. I love the energy, bringing the sizzle. Just make sure the 16th note is long, as it's marked down, and then click to the end.”
“Go into the end with lots of energy on those last two bars. We’re just aiming for perfection. That’s all.”
“Go into the end with lots of energy on those last two bars. We’re just aiming for perfection. That’s all.”
They finished ahead of schedule, and if the 350-odd student musicians bringing the music to life were nervous, it didn’t come through in their playing. The gritty new arrangement blared through the arena with loud, heavy power held in check but the controlled enthusiasm of a well-practiced ensemble.
“I don't want to say it felt normal because it wasn't a normal experience, but I felt really at ease just being with the rest of the band and the directors,” says sousaphone player and aerospace engineering junior Cathryn Sober.
“We had audio engineers there, and other people we didn't know, but it was a familiar environment. So the pressure just kind of went away, like I was just back in band camp with the people that I love performing music with. It just felt like putting good music together.”
And good music for an audience — one that’s both bigger than the EA Sports College Football gamer audience and decidedly smaller. Metallic was cranking out metal classics before anyone in the Carolina Band was alive, but for many of them it’s still very relevant and on a personal scale.
“I mean, I grew up driving to school with my dad, listening to the music in the car,” says Russell. “When I told him this summer that we were going to be doing a Metallica show, and it was going to include some of their best songs, like ‘Master of Puppets’ and ‘Enter Sandman,’ I knew it was going to be really fun for him to see that. Now, it’s just really cool to see something that we bonded over come to fruition later in life.”
