Scott Davis: The great climate debate

Scott Davis has followed the South Carolina Gamecocks football program for more than 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter that’s emailed each Friday. Following is the newsletter for Friday, Aug. 26, 2022. Scott also writes a weekly column that appears on Gamecock Central during football season.

If you read enough preseason college football – and South Carolina football – stories, eventually your eyes start to get the same glazed-over look that a dog gets when his owner is filling his dinner bowl.

Story overload is real, and its effects can be debilitating, and it can happen to all of us. Be careful out there.

And yet, despite the deafening crescendo of predictions and analyses at this time of the year, it’s still possible to learn a thing or two in the last lingering days before the season starts. Every now and then, a statistic or a factoid can leap off the screen and stop you in your tracks.

May I present Exhibit A to the jury? I got stopped, cold, in my tracks the other day while glancing at this story (Spencer Rattler predictions), particularly when I scrolled over the paragraphs regarding South Carolina quarterback Spencer Rattler’s chances of throwing for 3,000 yards this season.

At first blush, I didn’t think the idea sounded outrageous.

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The Gamecocks return some offensive weapons this year, added still more in the offseason, and the unit has had a year to figure out offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield’s complex system. While we’re here, Rattler has already thrown for 3,000 yards once in his career (albeit while wearing an Oklahoma Sooners uniform).

Look, 3,000 yards will always be an impressive feat for a college QB, but this isn’t 1973 anymore, and it’s happening more and more in the pass-happy 21st Century. Three thousand wasn’t Mission Impossible, was it?

But as the story reveals, a South Carolina quarterback has only thrown for 3,000 yards just three times since 2000 (for the record, it happened in 2010 with Stephen Garcia, in 2014 with Dylan Thompson and in 2018 with Jake Bentley).

That number seemed surprisingly low to me, particularly when I considered that the Gamecocks were coached by Steve Spurrier for more than a decade, and when I recalled that the likes of Ole Miss’ Chad Kelly, of all people, actually threw for FOUR THOUSAND yards in a single season a few years back.

Had the Gamecocks fallen behind their peers in joining the modern age and slinging the football up, down and around the field?

Well, like everything else in this life, it’s complicated.

Hoping to Get High-Octane

Most fans will tell you something like, “I don’t care how we win – I just want to win.”

I know this to be true because I’ve said this exact thing roughly 56,000 times in the last five years. And I’ve probably heard someone else say it 57,000 times.

We mean this, of course. We really don’t care if South Carolina goes 12-0 by running up the middle on every down, compiling 150 yards of total offense, and winning every game 10-7, with at least some of those points coming off a recovered fumble. Wins are wins, man.

But if we could choose…well, we’d choose to follow a team that went 12-0 and also eviscerated defenses with a high-octane passing offense that was so fearsome it inspired some ridiculous nickname like “Air Supply” or “Bomb Squad.” What can I tell you? The American people like to watch footballs being thrown and caught with reckless abandon.

As I’ve written many times, being a fan is a feeling more than it is a rational act, and the truth is, it just hasn’t felt like the South Carolina program has been at the forefront of offensive imagination over the years in terms of its passing attack and quarterback play. Even under the allegedly pass-wild Spurrier, the Gamecocks were a fairly balanced offensive unit that never resembled those free-for-all offenses you see in the Big 12.

That’s the feeling I’ve had, anyway. But feelings aren’t facts.

And the facts tell us that throwing for 3,000 yards in a single season remains a high hurdle. The most recent statistics I could find for 3,000-yard seasons was back in 2018, and more 3,000-yard seasons have happened since then, but as you’ll find here (3,000-yard passers in 2018? Every SEC team’s history and chances), few of South Carolina’s SEC brethren have stockpiled a host of 3,000-yard passing years.

As of 2018, Auburn had just two 3,000-yard passing years in its storied history. Alabama had just three at that point, as did LSU. Ultimately, South Carolina’s “three seasons of 3,000 passing yards in the 21st Century” number was largely in line with what its conference peers have been producing.

But enough with the facts. Let’s get back to that feeling.

I’d feel better if I saw the Gamecocks explode into an undiscovered solar system offensively – just once in my life. I’d like, just once in my life, for our opposing fans to be thinking “Man, I haaaate seeing that South Carolina offense trot onto the field.” In fact, I want opposing fans to be wildly queasy when they think about our offense, and maybe even start vomiting uncontrollably.

If that’s ever going to happen, the Gamecocks probably need to get up in the air.

Will this be the season it happens?

Climate Change Hoax

Have you heard about this guy Mark Stoops? Coaches the Kentucky Wildcat football team?

If you’re a South Carolina fan, you probably have, since Stoops is inexplicably something like 147-1 against the Gamecocks in his career (and something like 9-52 against everyone else).

Stoops made news two weeks ago when a clip emerged from an SEC Media Days interview in which, for reasons unknown, he began ranting about his bizarre notions regarding “changing the culture” as opposed to “changing the climate” at a program, implying that he, Mark Stoops, is a culture-changer and not a climate-changer.

Stoops railed against the idea that a coach could “dance around, put on some stupid sunglasses” and consider his program’s culture changed.

This odd outburst certainly felt like Stoops was letting us know that he didn’t enjoy the recent clip of Gamecock coach Shane Beamer dancing in sunglasses to Soulja Boy in a video to kick off the 2022 season (Did Mark Stoops take a shot at Shane Beamer?).

I mean, how many “college football coach dancing in sunglasses” videos are there out there?

Stoops has since claimed (unpersuasively) that his comments had “nothing to do with Shane Beamer,” while Beamer slyly suggested that he’s sure Stoops wouldn’t have “gotten out of his lane” to take shots at the Gamecocks (Shane Beamer responds to Mark Stoops comment).

As for me, I love this stuff.

Feuds are good. If teams and coaches are taking shots at you (then denying they did so), then that means they’re worried about you.

You don’t take shots at teams you don’t care about. No one is feuding with the Vanderbilt football team. No one is calling out the head coach of the Kansas University football team (well, except for Kansas fans).

When Steve Spurrier coached Florida, and again when he coached South Carolina, he took shots at other programs often, and publicly, and emphatically. And their coaches and fans certainly took shots at him.

Stoops has certainly earned the right to sneer at South Carolina until further notice – he’s owned the Gamecocks in recent years. But if he’s so troubled by a flicker of momentum landing with a program that he’s won seven of eight games against, that’s a good thing.

That means the climate is changing in Columbia, and it’s gotten even hotter.

Tell me what you thought about the Great Climate Debate or anything else on your mind by writing me at [email protected].

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