Scott Davis: The battle that never began

Scott Davis has followed the South Carolina football program for more than 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective each Monday during the season. Scott also writes a weekly newsletter that’s emailed each Friday; sign up here to receive it.

South Carolina fans had just one hope when we woke up on Saturday morning.

We wanted to see our team battle.

We wanted to see them scrap and claw and compete against the defending national champions. We wanted to see them make the Georgia Bulldogs uncomfortable – even if it was for just a few brief moments – at home inside Williams-Brice Stadium. We wanted to see a few tiny, tangible signs that the program was closing the gap, inch by inch and little by little, with the SEC elite in Year Two of the Shane Beamer Era.

We wanted this team to light up the crowd for a quarter or two, to generate a quick jolt of electricity, to make the old rafters shake for at least a couple of series. We wanted to see the boys in Silver Britches sweat, maybe for 15 minutes or even a whole half. We wanted all the recruits in the stands to head back home with a handful of vivid memories of the Cockpit as a fevered hotbed of passion and excitement.

We were not asking for miracles.

We did not seek the impossible.

We did not expect the sun to rise in the west and set in the east, or for the earth to stop spinning or for the mountains to fall into the sea.

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We knew, most of us, that South Carolina was not going to win this football game Saturday.

Not with the devastating, season-ending injuries the Gamecock defense had sustained in Arkansas. Not when Georgia’s roster was loaded with such otherworldly talent at nearly every position. Not with the Gamecock offense still groping for an identity and a sense of purpose (again).

No, we knew where we stood coming into this one. And we knew where Georgia stood.

Despite coach Beamer’s protestations this week that our team belonged in games like these and didn’t need a “win one for the Gipper” speech before kickoff, most of us knew this wasn’t a time for raised hopes or high expectations. And despite the foundational myth of Gamecock fans as being inexplicably and ridiculously optimistic, the actual truth is that South Carolina fans are almost painfully rational about those SEC games on the schedule that appear insurmountable each season.

The goal Saturday was simple: Hang around for a bit.

Stand and fight.

WIN! Framed picture of Williams-Brice Stadium signed by George Rogers

Whatever you do, don’t get run out of the stadium. Don’t turn Williams-Brice into a mortuary by the end of the first quarter. Don’t get your fan base started on those tortured conversations where they’re saying things to each other like, “When is the last time you’ve heard this stadium get this quiet? Twenty years ago? Twenty-five?”

But those are indeed the realities that Gamecock fans are facing today after Georgia humiliated South Carolina 48-7, with the final score not even coming close to suggesting how thoroughly and efficiently the Bulldogs spanked the home team.

Look, Georgia is the nation’s No. 1 team for a reason. The Bulldogs won the national championship last year because they are well-coached and have stockpiled world-class talent on offense and defense. They’ve made other teams besides South Carolina look silly already in 2022, doing so to Oregon in Week One. They will doubtless make plenty more opponents look atrocious before this season is done.

But even if a win wasn’t likely, the South Carolina football team had a lot to play for on Saturday.

All we wanted was to see our team battle.

And we’re still waiting.

The “I’m Just Here for the Tailgating” Game Balls of the Week

My time as a student at South Carolina in the 1990s coincided with the program joining the Southeastern Conference and immediately being overwhelmed by the talent gap that existed between it and everyone else in the league. Those were grim days. And as a result, soul-crushing blowouts like the one we saw Saturday against Georgia were all too common during that decade, eventually producing a laissez-faire “whatever, let’s get back out to the parking lot and get the party going” vibe in the student section.

As a new generation of Gamecock fans sadly began to learn around six or seven years ago, repeated beatdowns of this caliber have a numbing effect no matter how much you care about your school. They have an insidious way of instilling a kind of ironic detachment and bitter gallows humor amongst the fans – you’re either afraid to care or are no longer able to summon the will to do so. And that’s the absolute last place you want to find yourself as a fan base.

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Unfortunately, Saturday’s game was a vintage, throwback “over by the end of the first quarter” performance that brought back dark memories of the Ugly ‘90s for me, and probably for other fans who remember those black days with a shudder. I suspect that the Gamecock faithful partied like it was 1999 in the parking lots at Williams-Brice after this one. Because once you start believing you’re just there for the tailgating, it starts getting easier and easier to head for the exits when things go wrong. Trust me, I know from experience. A Ball or two to…

Triple Zeros – This football game couldn’t end fast enough. By the time the score was 14-0, I had already reached the “I’m not watching Georgia on offense for the rest of this game, not for any reason whatsoever” stage, which quickly led to the “I’m switching over to Oklahoma-Nebraska and only checking in on us during commercial breaks” stage, which quickly led to the “Hey, honey, do we have any errands we need to run this afternoon because I don’t need to stay home to watch football today after all” stage. I can’t remember ever being happier to see a clock reach triple zeros. It felt like this game lasted three days.

Not Being on Social Media – I liquidated all of my social media accounts four years ago, and as such, I didn’t doomscroll throughout Saturday evening, didn’t see a single allegedly “funny” video clip mocking the Gamecocks’ ineptitude against Georgia, nor any clips mocking the silly, pointless exuberance of South Carolina fans, nor any Gamecock fans sniping with each other on Twitter or calling for the firing of coordinators. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Living without social media provides a peace that surpasses all human understanding – especially during football season. Hit that delete button.

Bending the Knee – Sometimes the team you’re facing is simply better than you are. Sometimes the team you’re facing is astoundingly, terrifyingly better than you are. No, South Carolina didn’t give its best effort on Saturday. Unfortunately, I’m not sure it mattered. Today I’m bending my knee in the direction of Athens, Georgia. You should, too.

Deflated Balls, Georgia-South Carolina football version

Is it possible to give a Deflated Ball to whoever invented the sport of football and just be done with it? If not, we’ll hand out these instead:

Me, for Insisting Over the Last Several Years That Living in Georgia Amongst UGA Fans “Just Isn’t as Bad as People Think It Would Be” – As Clemson began its unimaginable ascent from perennially overhyped underachiever to one of the game’s elite programs (and yes, it still makes my hands go limp when I try to type those words), I kept writing in this column about just how happy I was to now be living in Georgia instead of back in my hometown of Greenville.

“If you want to start enjoying South Carolina football again, you need to get out of South Carolina,” was a maxim that I began telling friends and relatives, as though I had become some sort of wise Sports Fan Oracle living on a mountaintop. Now that I resided in metro Atlanta, losing that annual instate rivalry game at the end of the year no longer seemed to have the same power to inflict emotional harm on me. As for Georgia? Whatever. They always found a way to disappoint their fan base, often in enjoyably spectacular ways (as I wrote in my weekly newsletter a few days ago).

But after the game Saturday afternoon, my wife and I bravely ventured out to a popular shopping center in the Atlanta suburbs to grab dinner, where I encountered roughly 97,000 people wearing Georgia gear in what was an aggressively red-and-black scene.

Everywhere I turned, I kept running into variations of the same person – a preppy guy channeling the fashion stylings of Kirby Smart by wearing a UGA polo or golf shirt that was a size or two too large, baggy pleated shorts, tan loafers without socks, a Georgia visor featuring the vintage Bulldog logo, and a smug smirk that radiated confidence, as though they’d just watched their team punish Western Carolina or East Tennessee State instead of a Southeastern Conference rival.

As it turns out, when the Georgia Bulldogs win the national championship in football, it actually is that bad to live in Georgia amongst UGA fans. Who knew?

South Carolina’s Offense Still Being Allowed to Run Plays on Third Down – Why not go ahead and get the punting unit on the field to save time?

Despite the way this feels in the moment, the Gamecocks are 1-2, which is precisely where most of us predicted they would be after three weeks. The record isn’t shocking. Indeed, you could make a rational and reasonable case that the Gamecocks are who we thought they were with a quarter of the season in the books.

If it were just about the record, then we could live with 1-2.

But no fight?

No ability to make any kind of stand, at home, in front of a raging crowd, with the national champions on the opposing sideline?

That’s the thing we’re having a hard time living with.

Time to summon the Fight Club. If we can find it.

Tell me if you expect to see the Gamecocks make a stand going forward by writing me at [email protected].

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