Scott Davis: Shane Beamer has become The Exorcist for South Carolina football

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.

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Exorcisms have been all the rage lately.

Last fall, a direct sequel to “The Exorcist” – one of the greatest American films of all time – appeared five decades after the original came out. The movie was dreadful, but still…an “Exorcist” sequel! A documentary about the making of the original “Exorcist” also arrived.

These developments weren’t even remotely surprising.

Starting in the 2010s, exorcist-themed movies began showing up by the handful every year, kickstarting “The Conjuring” horror franchise and culminating in the inexplicable display of Academy Award-winning actor Russell Crowe starring in not one, but TWO different exorcist-related movies in the last two years (“The Pope’s Exorcist” and “The Exorcism,” if you’re scoring at home).

We’re clearly in the mood to drive out demons right now. For a horror fan like me, it’s been a godsend.

And for South Carolina football fans, Shane Beamer’s arrival to coach the Gamecocks has been a godsend, too.

Beamer has quickly established himself as the most popular South Carolina football coach of all time other than Steve Spurrier. There can be little debate about this, and it’s easy to figure out why. The Gamecocks under Beamer have stockpiled impressive wins against many of the SEC’s heavyweights, at times even embarrassing some of their most fearsome rivals.

But one of the most satisfying elements of the Beamer Era has been his uncanny knack for exorcising the program’s demons – if there’s a program that has tormented South Carolina fans through the years, his teams seem to find a way to ultimately take them down.

If there are losing streaks that have been driving us crazy, Beamer’s teams eventually end them. If there are foes and rivals that have had our number, the Shane Beamer Gamecocks find a way to take that number back. Teams and fan bases who’ve become accustomed to owning South Carolina suddenly find their homes being foreclosed upon and repossessed.

And as we near the end of the fourth regular season under Beamer, there can no longer be any question about it.

Shane Beamer has become The Exorcist for South Carolina football.

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Out, Demons, Out!

Did you hear about what happened at Williams-Brice Stadium over the weekend?

South Carolina defeated Missouri in thrilling, last-second fashion, ending the Tigers’ five years of dominance in the suddenly burgeoning rivalry. For Gamecock fans who watched their team hoist the Mayor’s Cup for the first time since before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, it felt like we’d finally driven a host of devils and goblins and evildoers back to the Show Me State where they belonged.

For Beamer, it was one of the last remaining boxes to be checked as head coach at South Carolina. He’d yet to defeat the Tigers in his time here, and with every passing defeat, the “can’t get over the Missouri hump” chatter was building.

Missouri was one of the few remaining obstacles for him.

One by one, the coach had taken down many of the programs that had plagued Gamecock fans for decades. In his first year, his teams punished Florida and defeated Auburn (astonishingly, something that had only happened once since South Carolina joined the SEC). The next year, it was Tennessee that withered beneath the bright light of the Holy Spirit.

Perhaps most importantly in 2022, he went ahead and took care of South Carolina’s longstanding Clemson problem: The Gamecocks had lost seven in a row to their archrivals at that point, and it threatened to swallow the program whole. Interestingly, two other coaches defeated Clemson by their second year at the helm – Spurrier and Joe Morrison – and those two coaches are the program’s greatest.

Wait, there’s more. Gamecock fans writhed in agony when Mark Stoops and Kentucky strung together seven wins in eight years against South Carolina – a nauseating development against a program that had long been near the SEC’s basement. But after dominating the Wildcats in Lexington a few months ago, South Carolina has now pieced together its own three-game winning streak in the series.

And now, this increasingly maddening Missouri nonsense has ended, too.

It didn’t end with luck. It didn’t end because Missouri collapsed.

It ended because the South Carolina Gamecocks went out and took a victory by any means necessary. Like an army of the righteous, they drove the demons out once and for all.

[Win two tickets to the South Carolina-Clemson MBB game]

Curses Collapse

The best thing about being a South Carolina fan is that hope never dies. Gamecock fans live by the Palmetto State’s motto dum spiro spero – “While I breathe, I hope.”

 But there’s a flipside to that.

The worst thing about being a South Carolina fan is that the decades of disappointment have accumulated into an everlasting sense of doom hovering around the program. Even though we never fully relinquish hope, lifelong fans like me often felt like a storm cloud was hanging above our heads at all times, waiting to erupt.

After enough mediocre seasons and losses to Clemson to close the year, you found yourself struggling even to enjoy the wins. You were always wondering if a lightning bolt was getting ready to strike you, and if it did, it would usually be when you least expected it…so you wound up expecting it.

For a brief, glorious moment under Spurrier, it felt like that storm cloud had lifted. It felt like doom had at last disintegrated, that whatever curses and hexes had been placed upon us a century ago had finally collapsed.

You started walking into Williams-Brice Stadium expecting to win, regardless of the opponent. You didn’t fear an out-of-nowhere upset, a soul-killing surprise to a lesser team. You expected victory and nothing less. Longtime tormentors like Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and Clemson started getting tormented themselves.

In Year Four of the Shane Beamer Era, that feeling is emerging again.

It feels like curses – always a flimsy excuse for mediocrity – have no power anymore.

It feels like this team could beat anyone they play.

It feels like the demons – the ones who have bedeviled us for years – are now becoming the prey. It feels, indeed, like there’s an exorcism happening right in front of our eyes.

All we have to do to make it real is believe.

Tell me how you’re feeling after another huge Gamecock win by writing me at [email protected].

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