Scott Davis: Standing on the edge of the season

Scott Davis has followed South Carolina athletics for over 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter year-round and a column during football season that’s published each Monday on GamecockCentral.com.

Following is this week’s Scott Davis newsletter. To receive it each Friday, sign up here.

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In the leadup to South Carolina’s SEC opener in Lexington against Kentucky this weekend, all of the usual pregame storylines began making the rounds.

We heard from Shane Beamer, from the team’s coordinators, from analysts and pundits locally and nationally. There were forecasts about what the Gamecocks might do to light a fire under the offense, and there was growing confidence about both new and old playmakers on the South Carolina defense, and as ever, there was chatter from Wildcat coach and longtime South Carolina villain Mark Stoops.

But many fans – this one included – weren’t quite as riveted by what’s in front of us as we are what’s behind us.

A significant portion of Gamecock Nation seems to be battling the after-effects of a mild hangover from South Carolina’s nail-biting victory over Old Dominion in Week One (check out my column from that game here). Of the many notes I received from anxious readers this week, not a single one mentioned Kentucky. Forget the obscenely difficult schedule that awaits us in 2024 – most of us are focused right now on ourselves.

As the late Toby Keith once sang, “I Just Wanna Talk About Me.”

I understand the consternation.

After everything South Carolina fans have been through over the last decade – the shocking and swift collapse of the Spurrier Era right as many of us were beginning to believe the program had at last become an annual contender in the SEC, followed by our archrivals suddenly morphing into an elite powerhouse, followed by the wreckage of the Will Muschamp years, followed by the wild mood swings and dramatic highs and lows of the Shane Beamer seasons – it’s hard to expect anything less.

Particularly when you contemplate the century of Gamecock football that preceded that chaotic decade.

Oh, we’ve been here before, standing on the edge.

We’ve even been here multiple times during Beamer’s three-plus years at the helm. Some of us were stepping towards the cliff as early as 2021 following a debacle at Texas A&M before the team rallied to post some unexpected big wins the rest of the way.

We were certainly walking towards the brink in 2022 after a pasting by Florida appeared to leave the season for dead…only to watch in amazement as the Gamecocks dismantled Tennessee and won on the road at Clemson. And had the Gamecocks lost to Jacksonville State near the end of the 2023 season as they were threatening to do, this fan base was prepared to lock arms and leap en masse into the abyss.

In every instance thus far under Beamer, we’ve avoided the complete and utter darkness that envelops a fan base that no longer believes.

But already in 2024, after just one week, after a victory that somehow felt oddly like a loss, we’re glancing in the direction of the edge.

Again.

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Can We Explode?

If South Carolina is to rejuvenate the hopes and dreams of its fans this season, the team will likely need marked improvement from its offense, whose struggles in the ODU game ignited spirited debates about play-calling and set Gamecock message boards and social media afire.

We all know it: The O has to play more consistently, figure out an identity and locate some playmakers if this team is to have a chance in 2024.

But I’ll admit to having some terrifying flashbacks to the Muschamp Era this week when I heard South Carolina offensive coordinator Dowell Loggains citing the need for more “explosive plays” by his offense. Conversations about Explosive Plays, you’ll undoubtedly recall, were mainstays of Muschamp’s time in Columbia.

It often seemed like the coach spent a portion of each week’s press conference talking about how necessary they were, to the point that I started envisioning the walls of his office being covered in charts and graphs about Explosive Plays (almost like one of those television shows where a haunted cop is hunting a serial killer and pastes every news clipping about the case on the available space surrounding his desk).

South Carolina’s players and coaches talked incessantly about creating Explosive Plays on offense while Muschamp led the program. Unfortunately, they too rarely succeeded in delivering them.

And those are precisely the kinds of dark memories that torment Gamecock fans even now, as we await another season on the edge.

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Slow the Roller Coaster

All the way back in the earliest days of the 2023 season, ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit spoke of Beamer’s challenge at South Carolina being to “stop the roller coaster” and instead find a steady, consistent journey to the next level.

Indeed, Beamer’s brief tenure has already included some of the program’s most dispiriting and frustrating losses in memory, while also including what have been unquestionably its highest of highs since Spurrier’s heyday. These kinds of breathtaking ups and downs have certainly been interesting and often entertaining (the Gamecocks have never been boring under Beamer, something that could not have been said during Muschamp’s time with the program), but they also have a way of leaving the fans strung out and fried.

What’s coming next? A trainwreck or a high-speed trip to another country? None of us can ever know for sure right now.

That makes it all the more difficult for us to put disappointing performances behind us, or to trust the successes when they do come.

Which is why it’s been hard for many of us to focus on the Kentucky Wildcats this week.

Hopefully the players and coaches are less scattered and more locked in than the rest of us are.

Because if they’re not, and this team turns in another troubling effort in Lexington on Saturday, the edge will be calling out to us yet again.

And quite a few of us will be listening.

Tell me how you’re feeling about the rest of the 2024 season by writing me at [email protected].

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