Scott Davis: The gas tank finally runs empty

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.

Throughout the wild, interesting and ultimately unforgettable 2022 season, the South Carolina Gamecocks always found a way to keep the bus moving forward.

Watching this team often felt like watching a powerful but occasionally unwieldy Greyhound move down the road. Sometimes the bus looked sleek and unstoppable, rolling over and crushing anything that stood in its path without the brakes even being applied. Sometimes it plodded and lumbered up the hill. Every once in awhile, it almost looked like it might sputter to a halt entirely.

But it never did, never quite stopped moving.

When the Gamecocks lost consecutive ugly games to Arkansas and Georgia early in the season, they responded by winning four straight, including victories over longtime SEC tormentors Kentucky and Texas A&M.

When they looked listless and lost in the middle of the season with brutal losses to Missouri and a still-head-scratching 32-point defeat to a mediocre Florida, they shocked us all by embarking on the greatest two-game run in South Carolina history, routing Playoff contender Tennessee and ending rival Clemson’s 40-game home winning streak.

Truth be told, we’d started getting used to watching this bus surge back to life after a stall.

In Shane Beamer’s brief two-year stretch as the South Carolina head coach, we’ve grown accustomed to watching his team deliver their best performances just when a moment of crisis seems at hand. In 2021, the Gamecocks curb-stomped Florida right after a historically embarrassing offensive performance against Texas A&M, and followed up a 30-point home loss to their archrivals by spanking North Carolina in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl.

So when the 2022 offseason began with a whole host of weirdness and unsettling developments descending upon the program, we thought this admirably resilient bunch would somehow find a way to bring home a win against Notre Dame in the Gator Bowl anyway. We thought the bus would trample over the remaining obstacles left in the roadway and grind on towards the 2023 season, a little battered and in need of a tune-up, but still capable of chugging onward.

Arriving in Jacksonville with a decimated roster suddenly devoid of key contributors on both sides of the ball (thanks to defections to the NFL Draft and the Transfer Portal), the freewheeling Gamecocks nonetheless raced out to a two-touchdown lead against the Irish and looked poised to add another victim to their growing collection of vanquished legends.

And then the second half arrived.

And this bus finally, at long last, ran out of gas.

South Carolina’s offense – feeling the effects from the absence of starters like MarShawn Lloyd, Jaheim Bell, Austin Stogner and the injured Josh Vann – suddenly became a three-and-out machine. Meanwhile, the Gamecock defense spent much of the half on the field, and with little depth following the departures of stalwarts such as Cam Smith and Zacch Pickens, they gradually wilted in the face of Notre Dame’s punishing rushing attack despite a heroic effort.

It felt like the Gamecocks gave everything they had. It felt like they left everything on the TIAA Bank Field turf. And it felt, in the end, that they’d fallen victim to that oldest and most worn-out sports cliché of them all: They ran out of gas.

They pressed the pedal one last time and found there was nothing left in the tank, no reserves left to draw upon.

Before any of us knew what happened, it was over: Notre Dame 45, South Carolina 38.

For the first time in a long time, the bus wasn’t moving.

And though we don’t exactly know what awaits us this offseason, we know that this machine will be retooled and refueled over the next several months.

And it will look very different the next time we see it.

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The “Williams-Brice Stadium South” Game Balls of the Week

By the tens of thousands, Gamecock fans traveled to Jacksonville and filled up the stands for the Gator Bowl, ultimately transforming the proceedings into a de facto home game for South Carolina. For the many decades I’ve been following this program, it has been and remains a college football truism: If Gamecock fans feel good about the way their season ended, they will travel to bowl games better than anyone anywhere. That’s why our first Game Ball goes to…

South Carolina Fans Absolutely Taking Over the Gator Bowl – Watching the game on TV from my home in Georgia, I quickly noticed that anytime ESPN’s cameras panned across the stands, nine out of every 10 fans I saw were wearing garnet and black. Early in the contest, Notre Dame’s offense was engulfed by crowd noise, leading announcers Taylor Zarzour and Matt Stinchcomb to comment that it was a “home game for South Carolina.” By the time Gamecock defensive lineman Nick Barrett intercepted a pass from Irish QB Tyler Buchner in the third quarter, my wife actually leapt out of her den chair and yelped, “God, it is so loud in there!” It was. As I watched the Gamecocks celebrate at midfield amidst deafening cheers, I thought, “Show this clip to every single recruit you encounter going forward. Let them see who they’ll be playing for.”

It was a beautiful moment.

And it didn’t last: The Gamecock offense went three-and-out, failed to capitalize on the opportunity, the ecstasy faded, and when it was all said and done, South Carolina did not, in fact, win the 2022 Gator Bowl.

But we’ll always have that moment.

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Xavier Legette – The Mullins wide receiver has had his moments during his years in Columbia (none of us who were there will ever forget the way he lit Williams-Brice Stadium on fire with an opening kickoff return for a touchdown against Texas A&M this season), but he delivered his finest performance yet as a Gamecock during the Gator Bowl. With offensive playmakers missing just about everywhere, the team needed someone – anyone – to step forward and make something happen, and Legette answered the call. He hauled in seven catches for 78 yards and two touchdowns, including a spectacular “tapping a toe in-bounds” grab in the end zone that left me soaring and confident that it was just South Carolina’s day (Spoiler Alert: It wasn’t).

Nate Adkins, Last Tight End Standing – After Stogner and Bell fled to the Transfer Portal, a once-crowded tight end room became very quiet indeed. Adkins, virtually the last tight end with anything resembling experience on the roster, responded with five catches for 78 yards.

Battling Defense – The defections clearly took their toll on the Gamecock defense, where the lack of depth crippled South Carolina’s chances for stopping the Irish rushing attack in the second half. Still, I found myself heartened by the courageous effort. They never stopped striving. Jordan Burch seemed to be everywhere at all times, Sherrod Greene was a tackling powerhouse, and the Gamecocks returned two Pick Sixes for touchdowns. Of course, that leads us directly to…

Deflated Balls

There’s absolutely no way we can fill out a Deflated Balls list without starting right here, is there?

Collecting Two Pick Sixes for Touchdowns and Somehow Not Winning a Football Game – I mean, does that ever happen? Roughly 100% of the time, if you watch your football team collect two Pick Six interception returns for touchdowns, you’re going to be celebrating a victory. When you mix in Legette’s unfathomable touchdown reception, it just seemed like there were so many undeniably positive signs pointing towards a South Carolina victory that it was almost breathtaking when the realization set in during the final minutes that it wasn’t happening. I’d given myself permission to believe after all these spectacularly happy moments – always and forever a sign that disaster is lurking.

Officiating Nightmares – I’m convinced the Gamecocks were poised to score at least three more points as the first half ended, but that opportunity was snuffed out when the refereeing crew decided to hang a pair of 15-yard penalties on South Carolina (including an unsportsmanlike conduct flag on an apoplectic Beamer). Near the game’s end, as the Gamecocks tried to mount a last-gasp effort to tie the score, a Notre Dame defender tackled quarterback Spencer Rattler, then squatted over him for an interminable period without any plan to ever remove himself. When a Gamecock player pulled the Irish defender aside, South Carolina was flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct (a genuinely amazing moment), effectively ending any hopes for a comeback. As a fan, your only desire for the officials is that they keep the game clean without imposing their wills at critically important times. As Beamer said after the game, “I hate to see it sometimes when officials make the game about them.” I also hate to see that. You probably do, too.

Watching the Notre Dame Offense Place Its Hands Around South Carolina’s Throat and Slowly Squeeze the Life Out of the Gamecocks – My Lord, that second half was one depressing viewing experience. The Irish wound up holding the ball for an ungodly 36 minutes of the contest, running the ball up the middle and grinding out first downs at will to ultimately compile a staggering 264 yards rushing. There’s nothing more lonely as a fan than those moments when you find yourself thinking, “I know they’re going to run the ball right now, and so does our defense, and yet there’s not a thing we can do to stop it”…and then that exact scenario happens, again and again.

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My Personal Gator Bowl Redemption Narrative – When I was a young South Carolina fan growing up in the 1980s, any time the Gamecocks were good (which wasn’t often enough to suit me), they wound up in the Gator Bowl. And then they promptly lost that Gator Bowl. The Heisman Trophy-winning George Rogers led the 1980 Gamecocks to the Gator Bowl, where they were pounded by Pittsburgh. My favorite sports team of all-time – the 1984 “Black Magic” Gamecocks – lost the Gator Bowl to Oklahoma State. And Todd Ellis’ electrifying 1987 Gamecocks fell in the Gator Bowl to LSU. For decades, I’ve been biding my time, hoping and praying that South Carolina would be invited back to Jacksonville so that I could avenge my boyhood Gator Bowl miseries.

It’s one of the craziest, dumbest, most ridiculous fantasies from my lifetime as a sports fan: I have been waiting for more than three decades to see the South Carolina Gamecocks win the freaking Gator Bowl.

I wanted it. I wanted it for 11-year-old me. I wanted it for 11-year-olds who are following this team right now, who don’t know anything about the 1980 and 1984 and 1987 Gator Bowl losses, but do know their desire to see South Carolina defeat Notre Dame in Jacksonville was vibrating inside every cell in their bodies.

When I was 11 and head over heels in love with the 1984 Gamecocks, I used to wander into the Waldenbooks at the Haywood Mall in Greenville and read the chronicle of the ’84 team “How ‘Bout Them Gamecocks!” by South Carolina Writer-in-Residence William Price Fox. I read it again and again and again, always wincing when I got to the part at the end, the part about the Gator Bowl victory that was supposed to crown the greatest Gamecock season ever – the victory that never happened. A cartoon in the book showed Gamecock fans driving back from the game on I-95 under the caption “World’s longest funeral procession…”

Here’s what Fox wrote about it: “The long and tragic ride back through Georgia up I-95, with the black flags flying from every antenna, was one of the darkest processions in the chronicles of western man. Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow will be in the history pages longer, but our solemn return will never, by those of us who were there to tell the story, ever be forgotten.”

Less than a decade later, I was attending the university, trying to learn how to be a writer, and Fox had become a mentor of sorts to me. After I’d read his book so many times in my childhood, it seemed like destiny that he would become my teacher.

And it seemed, alas, like destiny for the South Carolina Gamecocks in the Gator Bowl this time, too.

I believed South Carolina would finally win in Jacksonville this time around. I believed they’d finish up a remarkable season with a flourish, and I’d no longer have to confront the scars from the psychic wounds of my 11-year-old self.

But the gas tank ran empty before we could pull that bus back home.

We’ll fire it up again next year, and the next, and the next.

And no matter what happens, we’ll keep believing this is the time it finally finishes the journey home.

Tell me how you’re feeling after the Gator Bowl loss by writing me at [email protected].

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