Scott Davis: Slow fade to black

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

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Is it possible to know during the first game?

Is it possible to know while you’re watching the very first game of the year that the team you love is missing something? Is it possible to know in Week One that the season you’ve just started isn’t going to be one to remember?

We’re not supposed to think so.

Now that we’ve entered the ultra-rational Age of Analytics, fans like us have been taught to move beyond gut feelings, hunches, vibes and all that touchy-feely, superstitious silliness. One game – much less one half – just isn’t a large enough sample size, we’re told. Take a deep breath and let the season play itself out, we’re told. Don’t overreact too early, we’re told.

For the most part, I agree with this wisdom.

For the most part, I agree that fans should join the coaches and players in battling through the week-to-week adversity, keeping hope alive, staying the course and seeing where things stand after 12 games. In coach Shane Beamer’s first two years at the helm of the South Carolina program, patience paid off: In back-to-back campaigns, the Gamecocks rewarded their fans by storming back from early-season struggles to finish with a bang.

But I’ve been watching sports for a long, long time, my friends. And I’m here to tell you – sometimes you just know. Sometimes you know it’s not happening before anything has even really happened yet.

After the Gamecocks closed out the 2023 season on Saturday night with a loss to the team from the Upstate to finish at 5-7 and secure coach Shane Beamer’s first losing season as head coach, many of the fears we had for this unit in September seemed to have become fully realized.

Way back in Game One in that North Carolina contest, as the second half began to drift away from the Gamecocks, I felt a yawning emptiness opening inside my chest. Was it really possible that the season we’d been waiting on for nine long months might not make our dreams come true? Was it really possible that all the excitement, all the hype, all the enthusiastic offseason chatter might come to nothing, might just evaporate into the air before the season had even gotten started?

In that moment, it seemed like it was really possible.

Right there in Game One, I had a gut feeling, a hunch, and a vibe about 2023. I didn’t have much of a sample size, but I did have the feeling.

I had the feeling when I watched the Gamecocks struggle to keep Tar Heel defenders off quarterback Spencer Rattler’s back. I had it when I watched the team commit a litany of penalties and little mistakes throughout that first ballgame. I had it when that North Carolina game finally ended, and the feeling never really left me throughout September, October or November.

Even when South Carolina pieced together a three-game winning streak to enter the season finale against the archrival with a fighting chance at bowl eligibility, the feeling lived inside me. Something was missing.

It reminded me of all the summer evenings I spent watching the Atlanta Braves with my grandfather back in the 1980s and ‘90s. We’d sit down on his couch, cue up the TBS SuperStation for the Braves broadcast, and sometimes after a Braves starting pitcher had thrown just 10 or 15 pitches in the first inning, my granddad would turn to me and flatly announce, “He doesn’t have it tonight.”

You know what’s interesting?

In the 15 years or so that we watched Braves games together, I never remember a single time when it turned out an Atlanta pitcher actually did have it after he’d told me that. If my granddad told me “he doesn’t have it tonight” in the first inning, you could count on it: That pitcher did not have it.

As a fan, sometimes you just know.

Sometimes the feeling is real. Sometimes the doubt inside you exists for a reason.

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That first game gave us a sneak peek of almost everything we’d continue to see for the rest of South Carolina’s season: The Gamecocks gave up nine sacks in Game One, setting the tone for a season in which they would never be able to protect Rattler with any consistency. There were maddening miscues and foibles on both sides of the ball, none of which ever really stopped through 12 games. Injuries created depth concerns right out of the gates, and it kept happening again and again and again. The special teams magic we’d come to depend upon seemed absent, and it largely stayed that way.

In short, when it came to the 2023 season, we didn’t have it.

Most of us knew it early. Whenever I had a conversation with fellow Gamecock fans at any point this season, the same concerns and doubts surfaced that we’d been wrestling with since Labor Day. The storyline we fixated upon on Week One was the same one we were fixating upon on Week Twelve: Sacks, penalties, injuries and a mistake-prone team that often failed to give itself an opportunity to go win a football game.

After the tribulations of that first game, the rest of the season felt like a long, slow fade to black. It just took us until Game 12 for it finally become official.

Now coach Beamer faces his first offseason of genuine uncertainty as the leader of South Carolina football, and the rest of us are left to wonder if our old, familiar dark forebodings will swallow the program alive again. We can only hope not. But we’ll have a long offseason to think about it, one that won’t include a bowl game to distract our thoughts.

The answers will not begin to arrive until next September. Will Gamecock fans greet September 2024 with the same level of excitement and enthusiasm with which they greeted September 2023?

Well, I have already have a feeling about that one. And you can probably guess what it is.

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The Taylor Swift Game Balls of the Week

For a significant portion of 2023, Taylor Swift served as the namesake of the weekly Game Balls – as I often noted, she’s had a better 2023 than the South Carolina Gamecocks and their fans (and there’s no shame in it, folks. Tay has had a better 2023 than almost anyone). After another kick to the stomach against the archrival, there’s no reason not to honor Queen Swift one final time. A Taylor or two to…

Xavier Leggette – When I think of the 2023 season, I’ll remember Xavier Leggette. Largely overlooked coming into the year, he stepped into the role of offensive leader after Juice Wells was lost for most of the year to injuries, and the O-line’s inconsistencies made it difficult for Rattler to find anything resembling an ongoing rhythm. Leggette kept his head down, played ball and became The Man. I won’t forget it.

Resiliency – As difficult as this season often was to watch, it was heartening to see the Gamecocks battle all the way to the end. Win or lose, Beamer’s teams keep fighting, and that means everything to the fans who fill up Williams-Brice Stadium every week. After the ridiculous way this football game started (a dropped pass that a Clemson player picked up and trotted into the end zone for a touchdown), I expected a black hole to swallow South Carolina alive, as it often does in this particular game. Instead, they gave themselves a chance to win the game for most of the remaining four quarters, and they never stopped fighting.

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South Carolina Fans – Made the Cockpit a raucous, wild spring break party from the beginning Saturday night, and kept it that way despite the game starting about as dreadfully as it could have possibly started. Clemson now leads this series 73-43-4, and that number really is just as ugly as it looks on your screen, and sometimes you wonder how these fans are able to rally themselves to come back year after year, especially for this game. But they do. They did again on Saturday, and they’ll do it again in 2025, no matter what’s happening with the team they love.

The End – I can’t believe I’m typing this, but I was ready for this season to reach its merciful conclusion. Don’t get me wrong: I desperately wanted South Carolina to get to a bowl, for the players who fought so hard to keep the season afloat, for the fans, for the program’s future. But there are definitely some seasons when you’re ready to step away from the game for a minute and escape the swirling sense of chaos and calamity, and this was one of them.

Deflated Balls

When you watch the team you love, that represents the school you love, lose to its archrival for the 73^rd time in history, there are indeed some Deflated Balls.

Watching the Same Movie All Year Long – As noted above, all of the issues that seemed to be threatening South Carolina’s season in Week One were the same issues that finally doomed it in Week Twelve. For whatever reason, the team just couldn’t figure out how to mask the issues on the offensive line, clean up the penalty problems or tone down the mistakes and unforced errors. And it ultimately cost them bowl eligibility. It didn’t help that this was one of those years where the Football Gods decided to lower the injury boom on the Gamecocks, either. There’s no other way to say it: We just didn’t have it in 2023.

Doom – Sometimes you just know. Call me crazy, call me old-fashioned, call me superstitious, call me silly. But sometimes a fan just knows. It feels like doom has been following me since that game up in Charlotte, when College GameDay’s cameras descended to record the arrival of an upstart new force in college football. I’ve felt it every week since. On Saturday, my wife and I went to get a Christmas tree (something we’ve been doing for years during the annual Clemson game, because it gives us a festive feeling on a day that usually goes the wrong way, helping to mitigate the ugliness), and after she spent two hours decorating and lighting it, we were trying to clip off a portion of the treetop when someone – I won’t say who – accidentally clipped the light cord. Poof – just like that, our tree had no lights.

One minute we had a beautiful tree, the next minute were swallowed by darkness.

It was a fitting way to kick off a rivalry game that none of us seemed to feel particularly hopeful about, try as we might.

That old, familiar feeling had been following us for months.

On Saturday, our fears came true.

Friends, sometimes you just know.

You wish you didn’t, but you know.

Tell me how you’ll be spending the long offseason by writing me at [email protected].

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