Scott Davis: Beamer Ball delivers the wakeup call

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. He also writes a weekly newsletter that’s emailed each Friday. Sign up here to receive it.

It had been a dream offseason.

From the first of January to the last days of August, Gamecock fans had been carrying around that feel-good feeling. Winning the last game of the season – and doing it against an insufferable old neighbor – always brightens the offseason months.

So did the success South Carolina had in mining the Transfer Portal for key new contributors during the winter recruiting push.

And so did the Shane Beamer Charisma World Tour, which made stops along the booster circuit in the spring, then at SEC Media Days, then at press conferences for the August practices, all featuring a personality-plus head coach whose every move during the offseason seemed to sparkle and shimmer for a fan base that had been starved for a little style and flair in recent years.

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That’s why it wasn’t a surprise that Gamecock fans filled the old stadium on George Rogers Boulevard all the way to the rafters for the 2022 season opener against Georgia State, and they were jacked and pumped and ready to party long into Saturday night.

But the party, alas, took some time to commence.

Indeed, the dream offseason had been so pleasant, so peaceful and so restful that for a while it seemed the Gamecocks had difficulty waking from it in time to kickstart the new campaign.

Like many season openers, this game featured a mix of intermittent excitement, plentiful miscues and the occasional big play with long stretches of dullness that resembled those interminable moments during an Academy Awards ceremony where they’re honoring things like set design, costumes and lighting.

Georgia State even managed to briefly slip ahead in this football game as late as the third quarter, and the Williams-Brice crowd that had been so exuberant and joyful just a few hours earlier seemed poised to drop back into the offseason slumber.

We all needed a wake-up call – team, fans, coaches, everybody.

That call came in the form of lethally efficient special teams play that shook us out of snooze mode and splashed cold water in our faces. You want to talk about special? Consider the following:

• Not one, but two blocked punts, both returned for touchdowns, to put points on the board for the Gamecocks on a night the South Carolina offense had trouble putting the car in drive and moving forward
  
• Not one, but two 50-yard-plus field goals from new placekicker Mitch Jeter, who didn’t seem remotely phased by having to replace longtime kicking stalwart Parker White
  
• A fake field goal that resulted in a first down, followed by a touchdown, for the men in garnet and black
  
• A punt by Kai Kroeger that nearly traveled 80 yards and caused me to actually stand up from the couch and start walking in circles for no apparent reason
  
• Without all of the above, this is a different football game, and perhaps, you and I aren’t feeling particularly cheerful on this Labor Day.

Spectacular special teams play, of course, was the hallmark of the Virginia Tech teams coached for decades by Shane Beamer’s father, Frank. This kind of “winning by any means necessary” style eventually was christened Beamer Ball, and Virginia Tech’s opponents lived in fear of it. If you found yourself playing the Hokies, you kept nervously expecting those dreadful kickoff returns for touchdowns, or a gut-flaying blocked kick, or an onside kick recovery, or some kind of special teams bomb blast that always seemed to drop out of the heavens and detonate your chances at the worst possible time.

Eventually, it almost became a self-fulfilling prophecy: Opponents worried so much about Virginia Tech’s special teams unit making a big play that they almost willed it into happening.

And without Beamer Ball on Saturday night against Georgia State, we might all be ready to hop back into bed, pull the covers up to our eyeballs, fasten our eyelids as tight as we can and try to think of something pleasant, like puppies or cheeseburgers.

Instead, we’re wide awake. We’re 1-0. And we’re ready to see what happens next.

The Pete Lembo Game Balls of the Week

If you’ve read this column in years past, you’re certainly well aware that we name the weekly Game Balls after something or someone that brings a smile to our face and puts a hop in our step. Past Ball namesakes have included Pharoh Cooper, Bryan Edwards, pepperoni pizza, and my wife, Christie Davis – this is an esteemed list that only includes legends.

After one week in the 2022 season, the Balls belong to South Carolina Special Teams Coordinator Pete Lembo, and he’ll hold on to them as long as his unit continues blocking punts for touchdowns, drilling long field goals and swaggering around the field with confidence and authority. Let’s hand out a few Lembos to the following:

Beamer Ball!!!!! – As soon as I saw a Georgia State punt flutter off the fingers of South Carolina’s Rashad Amos, and the Gamecocks’ DQ Smith pick up the ball and rumble into the end zone, I knew we were all about to start bandying around the phrase “Beamer Ball” for several days following this football game. And I couldn’t wait to join in the fun. It took the SEC Network’s announcers about 0.00003 seconds after that blocked punt to begin floating “Beamer Ball” during the broadcast, and I immediately made plans to include the cliché in the headline for this week’s column.

Mission accomplished! What can I tell you – I love cliches. Especially cliches that describe my football team’s special teams unit blocking punts with wild abandon, dropping cheap and easy scores on the heads of their flustered opponents, kicking unimaginably long field goals and in general adding a healthy dose of excitement to a football game that desperately needed some. Speaking of excitement, let’s be sure to hand a Lembo to…

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A Fired-Up Williams-Brice Crowd That Showed Up Ready to Deliver a Homefield Atmosphere Worthy of the Spurrier Years – For the last several years, I’ve spent the Labor Day weekend with my family celebrating my parents’ anniversary (54 years and going strong!), which has necessitated that I watch the season opener from afar. The distance has allowed me to observe the home crowd as a neutral bystander rather than a passionate participant, and in the last few seasons, I’ve seen the Gamecock faithful enter each new season with emotions ranging from hopeful-but-terrified to a kind of “I’m just here for the tailgating” morbid curiosity.

On Saturday, the fans came to attack this season opener. They were hungry to show up and scream. They believed. They were ready to impose their will. The frenzied opening minutes reminded me of those unforgettable atmospheres from the Spurrier years (like 2012 against Georgia) that defined a generation of South Carolina football. That’s why it was unfortunate the game itself often fell into a deep lull, and why those special teams lightning jolts were so necessary for recharging the crowd’s batteries. While we’re on the topic of recharging the crowd…

The New LED Light Show Features at the Stadium – I’m not sure what it felt like to be inside Williams-Brice while the stadium lights flickered and popped in sync to “Sandstorm” or when the spotlights swirled to commemorate Gamecock touchdowns, but I can tell you that it looked genuinely impressive on television. When you’re watching a game and thinking “Man, I wish I was there,” and you’re thinking it because of some lighting effects, you know the stadium operations team is going above and beyond.

For the last 10 years, South Carolina’s athletic administration has made a noticeable commitment to improving the gameday atmosphere at Williams-Brice, and this fan, for one, is grateful for the efforts. In the Social Media Age, it’s more important than ever to find ways to help the program stand out amidst the blur of Saturday gamedays in the fall. Congratulations to everyone involved in putting this feature together. And on that note, we’d be remiss if we didn’t give a Lembo to…

Shane Beamer’s Ecstatic Post-Punt Block Sideline Dance Amidst Flickering Lights – Beamer briefly lost control of his body after the Gamecocks scored the first of their two punt-block touchdown returns, and the fact that it happened within a pulsing storm of strobe lights made the moment even more special. May this rave never end.

Deflated Balls

Did it look like this football team hadn’t played an official game in nine months, and was breaking in a new quarterback who had no game experience playing with his new teammates and his new offensive coordinator, and thus wasn’t operating with maximum efficiency or crispness? Why, yes. Yes, it did. Deflated Balls to the following…

Me, for Simply Re-running the Following Paragraph That I Wrote In a Column from Last Season Following the East Carolina Game, Which I Will Now Present in Its Entirety Without Any Additional Comment – “It seems like offensive line struggles are endemic at this university – it doesn’t seem to matter who coaches the unit or plays for it. Pick a year over the last three decades, and you can probably describe the South Carolina offensive line as “the struggling South Carolina offensive line.” How do we make it stop?”

Running Aground on the Ground – With some experienced returning backs and the addition of promising newcomers, the South Carolina rushing attack looked like a strength of the team coming into this season. But the Gamecocks aren’t going to be able to defeat too many SEC opponents this season if they continue to average 3.3 yards per carry in the running game. This was the opposite of “imposing your will on a defense.”

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Oh, No…Is It Third Down Again? – South Carolina’s struggles in downs One and Two often left it with insurmountable distances to compile on third down, and the offense couldn’t answer the challenge. The Gamecocks were an ugly three-for-14 in third down conversions during the game, and that made it impossible to find anything resembling a rhythm.

Technology – Spending the weekend at a cabin in the North Carolina mountains, I found myself struggling to cue up South Carolina vs. Georgia State on the shiny flatscreen in the cabin’s den as kickoff approached. I’d read Gamecock Central’s “This Is How You Can Watch Saturday’s Game” story at least 12 different times by 7:30 and thought I was ready to play, but as the clock ticked towards the magic hour, I still hadn’t been able to get the broadcast to appear on my television set.

I had switched streaming services during the offseason and didn’t have a game under my belt with it, and the remote I was using in the cabin forced me to try to pull up ESPN’s website on the TV, use the remote control as a type of cursor, and type in my streaming information into the site in order to draw up the game.

Panicked and almost catatonic, I couldn’t stop my hand from shaking enough to type in the proper credentials, and finally handed the remote over to my wife, who painstakingly typed the information and got us squared away just as kickoff occurred. This could have been a genuine crisis. Maybe I need to start having trial runs with my television remote during the offseason to make sure I have every base covered.

Meanwhile, if any of us were still lingering in the feel-good feelings of the dream offseason after Saturday night, it’s time to snap into an upright, alert position as Week Two approaches.

Because SEC football officially starts now, in Fayetteville, against a Top 20 Arkansas team that looked mighty impressive in its own Week One opener against Cincinnati.

SEC football, as we all know, never sleeps.

And neither can we.

Tell me what you thought about the things you saw in Week One by writing me at [email protected].

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