Scott Davis: Williams-Brice swallows the universe

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.

My voice box sounds like it has been passed through a paper shredder.

My back feels like it’s being held together with Elmer’s glue, my feet are swollen, and I no longer have fingernails on my left hand.

But don’t get it twisted: I’m a happy man today.

Though my body has been ravaged and manhandled by a malady that will forevermore be referred to as Williams-Brice Stadium Syndrome, I am a happy man after South Carolina shook off nearly a decade of misery against Texas A&M Saturday night with a relentless 30-24 win over the Aggies inside the old ballpark on George Rogers Boulevard.

As soon as the Gamecocks upset Kentucky on the road in Lexington a few weekends ago, I looked at the calendar, saw this game looming, and circled it. I needed to be there. I needed to make the short drive over from my home in Georgia and stand on my home state’s soil again, to get back in the frenzied mix, to be amongst my people for the first time since before the pandemic had stopped our lives cold.

And my people were there, and they were alive, and they were present in their excitement. More than a mile outside Williams-Brice Stadium, it was already evident that an unlawful, psychotic energy was afloat. I wanted some of that energy, wanted to breathe it into my core.

Can I tell you what was happening inside my chest when my father-in-law steered the car on to Bluff Road from the interstate more than three hours before kickoff, and we noticed that the traffic was already stalled to a halt? That’s when we knew: This was going to be a wild night.

Wild it was.

When you’ve watched sports as long as I have, sometimes you just know. Sometimes the crowd will tell you, from the beginning, that it is simply not going to be denied, and you look around at the people beside you and in front of you and behind you, and you think, “We are going to make this game go the way we want it to tonight.”

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We will never really know how these nights come to us, or where they come from.

This is a different energy than you find on those nights when you’re hoping you can will the team to the finish line. Hopeful energy is the energy that most often runs through the seats at Williams-Brice, and it has its own power and grace and appeal.

But hoping is not the same thing as knowing. Though a hopeful crowd can produce plenty of noise and enthusiasm, a crowd that knows – a crowd that has made a collective decision before kickoff, as though they’ve unconsciously joined hands and said to each other, “We are not losing here tonight” – can move mountains.

Mountains were moved at Williams-Brice Stadium on Saturday night. The 0-for-A&M streak that had infuriated Gamecock fans since 2014 was for all practical purposes ended when the first note of “2001” sounded before kickoff. That’s the moment this game was decided. The Gamecocks played well at times during a long four quarters, particularly on defense, but this was the crowd’s night.

This was the night that Williams-Brice swallowed the universe. And anyone who was there will remember this one for as long as they live.

If you’ve read my column over the years, you know that I am often strangled by doubt when I watch South Carolina games. I’ve experienced too much heartbreak, too many breathtaking and agonizing moments, to ever fully lose myself in the moment. Even when the Gamecocks are winning, I often struggle to give myself permission to feel good, to allow myself to enjoy what’s happening.

I never completely lose hope, of course. No Gamecock fan ever does. Hope is fused into our backbones, runs in our bloodstream. No matter what, I always hope.

But I almost never know. Saturday night, I knew.

As kickoff approached, I looked around at the waving towels and the bouncing fans and felt the music rattling my insides, and I couldn’t hear my own voice, and I knew. And I knew that I knew, because I could feel myself saying it in my head.

We. Are. Winning. This. Game. Tonight.

And I knew tens of thousands of you, at that very moment, were saying it to yourselves all across that stadium, in that old gathering place at the Fairgrounds where we come together on Saturdays in the fall.

We. Are. Winning. This. Game. Tonight.

And we did.

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The Williams-Brice Stadium Game Balls of the Week

There is a legend, possibly apocryphal, that Bobby Bowden, upon bringing his world-beating Florida State Seminoles to Williams-Brice Stadium on a Saturday night in 1984, stood on the sidelines as “2001” poured out from the speakers, stared at the screaming throngs of Gamecock fans, and whispered to an assistant coach, “We ain’t winning here tonight.”

They did not win here that night.

And Texas A&M, despite needing a win in the most desperate of ways, and despite bringing a tractor-trailer’s worth of elite four-and-five-star players with them to George Rogers Boulevard this past weekend, did not win here Saturday night either.

Because I grew up in the 1980s and fell in love with the Gamecocks in the 1980s, it was only fitting that I started giving Williams-Brice Stadium an ‘80s-related nickname during the glory days of the Steve Spurrier years.

Electric Avenue is what I started calling it.

If a friend or family member started grumbling about how much Clemson was winning, circa 2011, I’d say something like, “Well, they haven’t been to Electric Avenue yet.” We are not patting ourselves on the back too much when we acknowledge that there was not a better environment anywhere in the game than in Columbia during those days.

But coming into Saturday night’s game, we all knew that Williams-Brice hadn’t been Electric Avenue in a long time. Through the strange, sad end of Spurrier’s reign, on to the joyless drift of the Will Muschamp Era and into a pandemic period that limited the number of fans in the seats, Electric Avenue seemed to have been shuttered.

None of us knew when it might return. Some of us wondered if it ever would.

We felt a flicker of the old spark when Shane Beamer brought his infectious energy to the football building at the end of 2020, and here and there during the last year-and-a-half, there have been moments (like against Florida in 2021) when it seemed like a higher voltage was flowing through the stands.

But Electric Avenue did not officially reopen until Saturday night. And now that it’s operating at full force again, which of our friends in the SEC is excited about visiting it? That’s why we must throw our first Game Ball in the direction of…

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Williams-Brice Stadium at Night – Texas A&M accumulated eight false starts Saturday night. Eight. EIGHT!!! Williams-Brice Stadium, everybody. I’ve been attending games here for many decades – that’s decades, plural – and I’m not sure I’ve ever been inside that stadium when it was coursing with that much energy. I’ve seen bigger wins that meant more in the grand scheme, but I’m not sure the crowd has ever been that transcendent.

Shane Beamer – Unless you are a member of Jimbo Fisher’s immediate family, you had to feel your heart swelling with joy at the sight of an exuberant Shane Beamer during the postgame celebrations. I was walking down the tunnel at the side of the stadium on the way out and caught a glimpse on the jumbotron of him standing at midfield and embracing his father, Frank. We will not discuss whether or not I felt a sob welling up in my throat at this moment.

The First Five Minutes – Xavier Legette’s race to the end zone on the opening freaking kickoff, the Darius Rush interception and return to the five-yard line, the turnover swallowed up by Tonka Hemingway, followed by a Christian Beal-Smith touchdown… I mean, we hadn’t even settled into our seats and it was 17-0, and that crowd was vibrating with ecstasy in ways that I had not even known existed. Electric Avenue won the game in the first five minutes. Period.

MarShawn Lloyd, Again – He never stops never stopping. His stats for the night: 18 carries for 92 yards and a couple of touchdowns. Handing the ball to Lloyd is by far South Carolina’s best offensive play at the moment. “We have a bunch of believers on the team,” Lloyd told the SEC Network after the game. He’s made believers out of the folks in the stands, too, and on Saturday night, it showed.

Defensive Resiliency – After forcing two turnovers early, South Carolina’s defense strapped it in for the long haul and for much of the night held off an Aggie offense that, despite its inconsistencies in 2022, is loaded with high-quality players. Every time it seemed like the Gamecocks absolutely had to put the clamps on a crucial third-down play, they did. It didn’t hurt that the crowd kept taking them to a higher place, either.

My Father-in-Law and I Heroically Eating About a Dozen Pastries Apiece Before the Game to Carb Up for a Big Night – We swung through Greenville’s legendary bakery Strossner’s before making the drive to Columbia, with a plan to pack some sausage and ham biscuits for the postgame ride. But once inside, we wound up filling up a box with danishes, brownies, cookies and other goodies. By the time we’d reached Newberry, he and I were soaring on a sugar high. Let’s just say we were ready to rock on to Electric Avenue by kickoff.

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Deflated Balls

Should we even hand these out this week? Let’s get it over with, quickly.

Pass Interference/”Holding on Pass Plays” Penalties – Man, oh man. Throughout the 2022 season, it seems like every time I’ve started celebrating a critical third-down stop by the South Carolina defense, I hear a referee speaking into a microphone, “Pass interference…on the defense…” Saturday night, both pass interference and an array of holding calls on Gamecock secondary players kept getting called, leading at one point to an unfortunate exchange between my fist and the back of the seat in front of me.

Dropped Passes by the South Carolina Offense – There were a few. These are absolute drive-killers.

South Carolina’s Offense, Still in the Process of Finding Itself After Seven Games – Did you ever know a guy in high school that skipped college and drifted off to parts unknown after graduating to “find himself”? That’s where the South Carolina offense still seems to be right now. We know we’ve got a good thing in MarShawn Lloyd. And we know there are plenty of weapons at receiver and tight end (and even at running back behind Lloyd). And…that’s about all we know.

Texas A&M’s Tighty Whitey Brigade of Yell Leaders – As a lifelong college football fan, I knew all about A&M’s legendary Yell Leaders, a unit of enthusiastic students wearing skintight all-white getups who lead Aggie fans in cheers during the game using an odd assortment of hand motions and gyrations. Listen, I celebrate all of college football’s goofy traditions – Auburn’s swooping eagle, our obsession with “2001,” Georgia’s strange worship of shrubbery. It’s what we love about the sport. And as such, I’m glad the Yell Leaders exist, and indeed, shower them with God’s abundant blessings. Still, until you see the Yell Leaders in person, with your own eyes, it’s hard to truly understand just how ridiculous they look up-close as they perform an elaborate show of what can only be described as third-base coach signals on crack. I will add nothing further other than to say that I would imagine A&M’s historic rivals (Texas, TCU, Oklahoma, etc.) have had some fun with the Yell Leaders throughout the decades.

Even the Yell Leaders, potent as they may be, didn’t have an answer for Williams-Brice Stadium on Saturday.

No one could have.

On this night, we were not losing this game.

We. Were. Not. Losing. This. Game.

As for Electric Avenue, it is open for business, it is alive, it is well, and it is ready to welcome the Missouri Tigers this Saturday.

You think they’re looking forward to it?

Tell me about your experiences at Williams-Brice on Saturday night or anything else on your mind by writing me at [email protected].

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