Scott Davis: The price of passion

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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Georgia head coach Kirby Smart did something interesting this week.

He called out his own fans. Following Georgia’s easy breezy 31-13 win over rival Auburn in Athens this past Saturday, Smart told a sideline reporter, “To be honest, I’m probably disappointed in our fans for the first time. I thought there was a really lack of affecting the game crowd-noise wise, passion and energy.”

It got worse.

“We need it to be tough on other teams to play here, but it’s not,” Smart said of the historically legendary atmosphere Between the Hedges. “It’s not the same as it’s been in the past.”

Yikes.

Remember, Smart played for Georgia. He’s been the Bulldogs’ head coach since 2016 and led them to back-to-back national titles in 2021 and 2022. Presumably, there are few people in all the wide world who care as much about the University of Georgia and its supporters as Coach Kirby.

But that didn’t stop him from telling them they needed to give him and his team more: More love, more noise, more screaming, more passion. Gimme more, as Britney once sang. He asked for this, of course, just a week after his team lost to Alabama in a game that saw the Tide race out to a 28-0 lead and then stave off a furious UGA rally.

As weird as the moment seemed, it’s also nothing new.

College football coaches have been exhorting their own fans to bring the noise since the game was invented.

South Carolina coach Shane Beamer did the same in a much more pleasurable and enjoyable way after his Gamecocks drilled Kentucky earlier this season, and he told an SEC Network sideline reporter, “Williams-Brice needs to be freaking rocking this Saturday!!!” for a game against LSU (Spoiler alert: It was).

Ask any major college coach anywhere if he wants his home environment to be wild, woolly, and rabid, and he’ll give you an unqualified “yes.”

But the price of passion is that it goes both ways.

When you stoke passion and fire – when you make people care – you cannot be surprised when they feel discouraged, disappointed, and disillusioned when you fail. What else would they feel?

You can’t turn passion on and off. It’s an energy that needs to go somewhere, to be unleashed.

And one way or the other, it will be.

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The Sharing of Caring

One of my favorite things about being a South Carolina fan is that Gamecock fans care – really care. Sometimes, it almost seems like we care too much. But no one can ever accuse us of not showing up.

When you’re a part of this fan base, you are part of a family that agonizes, suffers, and celebrates together.

We love harder, longer, and louder than just about anyone, particularly when you consider what we’ve gotten in return across more than a century of athletic competition.

There’s nothing – nothing – like being inside Williams-Brice when it’s on fire. During the LSU game, the ESPN broadcast called the stadium a “seething cauldron.” Nothing compares to it when it’s seething.

More than any other head football coach in South Carolina history, Beamer knows and appreciates this. And the fans know that he knows it, too – that’s why so many Gamecock fans are deeply invested in him succeeding here.

Passion is unruly, of course.

Whenever South Carolina football endures a discouraging stretch, I can count on receiving heartfelt notes from fans everywhere, many of whom tell me how long they’ve been doing this, how much of their hearts they’ve given to the program. I got many such notes this week after the Gamecocks failed to report for duty last Saturday in a critical home game against Ole Miss.

I always understand.

This is what caring feels like. And if coaches want even more of it, they may want to consider just how powerful a force it is and how little they can control it.

[Win two tickets to the South Carolina-Texas A&M football game]

An Uneasy Balance

I almost always side with the fans in any dispute between them and coaches and players. As such, I predictably found Smart’s comments annoying and condescending.

But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

Fans can indeed become complacent. As a fan, you always care. But there are definitely times when you care more and times when you’ve become spoiled and entitled. Was it tougher to play in Athens a decade ago than it is now, now that Georgia has become the premier football program in college sports?

Yes.

Fans always work harder when they’re hungry.

And fans are among the most fickle and needy creatures in existence. Looking at the columns that I write from week to week will tell you that. I was exasperated following the Old Dominion game, ecstatic after Kentucky, despondent after LSU, mildly encouraged after Akron, and despondent again after Ole Miss. I was the same human being after each game – the only difference was in how the Gamecocks played the previous Saturday.

Ridiculous? Sure.

But isn’t that what coaches want from us? Don’t they want us to be a little ridiculous? Don’t they, in fact, need us to care just this ridiculously?

Don’t they want a seething cauldron?

That’s why we’re always seeking that uneasy balance: We need to care and care ridiculously…but not so much that we’re insufferable and hateful and impossible to please.

My guess is that if Georgia goes on to make the College Football Playoff and win another title this year, the first thing Kirby Smart will do is thank the Bulldog fans.

Without them, he’s just a middle-aged dude who oversees a group of teenagers and twentysomethings tossing an inflated piece of pigskin around.

But with them? With them, he’s a guy who will have a statue of himself built outside Sanford Stadium.

Tell me what it feels like to care by writing me at [email protected].

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