Scott Davis: We're at the fork in the road

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.

Following is this week’s Scott Davis newsletter. To receive it each Friday, sign up here.

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Some games feel like turning points.

Every football season has them, those games that feel like places where your team needs to make a stand, the games that become hills to die upon. When you get to these games, you’re at the proverbial fork in the road. You’re at the place where a definitive decision will be made: This is the way this season’s heading.

Whether that’s a good way or a bad way depends on what happens in the game in question.

And friends, this Saturday’s 3:30 tilt with the Rebels of the University of Mississippi feels like one of those games. It feels like, just four games into the 2024 season, we’ve already arrived at the turning point. We’re at the fork in the road, right now.

Which way are we headed?

We know, of course, that South Carolina football under Shane Beamer will always be exuberantly unpredictable. It’s certainly possible the Gamecocks could lose to Ole Miss and still stage a surprise somewhere down the road to transform a sinking season into something special. They’ve done it before. It would be foolish to ever count out surprises where a Shane Beamer-led program is concerned.

But the stakes for this week are obvious and unmistakable.

After this, the Gamecocks hit the road to play Alabama in Tuscaloosa and Oklahoma in Norman. Was that sentence as painful to read as it was to type?

Following that gauntlet, the schedule somehow still includes Top 25 denizens like Texas A&M, Missouri and Clemson. Meanwhile, Vanderbilt – if you need them – has already performed some un-Vanderbilt-like things in 2024, defeating Virginia Tech and taking Mizzou to overtime. I don’t think we want to rely on late season surprises to secure bowl eligibility this year, do you?

 Which brings us back to the Ole Miss Rebels in Williams-Brice Stadium on Saturday.

The Rebels looked absolutely lethal in their first three games before stumbling at home last week to Kentucky – the same UK team that the Gamecocks drilled into the bluegrass a few short games ago. Now, inside the friendly confines with “Sandstorm” blaring, feels like a wonderful time to take a stand.

Yep, this is the fork in the road.

Which way are we headed?

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Game of the Year, Part II

It shouldn’t be too difficult for South Carolina’s players to get sky-high for a Battle Royale/Hill to Die On/Fork in the Road Game.

That’s because they’ve already played one such contest already in 2024 against the LSU Tigers. You may remember how that one turned out.

Had the Gamecocks closed out LSU in Williams-Brice and coasted into this weekend at 4-0, we wouldn’t be feeling the suffocating “do or die” vibes that we currently feel emanating above the old ballpark on George Rogers Boulevard.

Instead, the good guys faltered late, the Tigers returned to Baton Rouge in victory and South Carolina fans immediately began coalescing around the idea that they were suffering through the most devastating Gamecock football defeat in a generation (you can rear my discussion of that idea in my most recent column from the Bye Week).

Ideally, you wouldn’t have more than one Fork in the Road Game per season.

You’d get the W in the first one and send your season into a happy realm of joy and light.

Since that didn’t happen, we’re clinging to the hope that the LSU game actually wasn’t the real Fork in the Road Game in 2024, and that this upcoming contest against Ole Miss is the true battlefield upon which the Gamecocks will never surrender.

One way or the other, this season is going to be heading towards a particular destination when this game ends.

Let’s hope that destination includes a bowl game.

[Win two tickets to the South Carolina-Texas A&M football game]

That Old Georgia Feeling

Back during the Steve Spurrier heyday, one game in particular always seemed to transform itself into the Fork in the Road Game.

It happened early in the season, and it happened against the Georgia Bulldogs.

It wasn’t an exact science, but you could usually rely on the following formula when following a Spurrier South Carolina team: Beat Georgia, and it’s a special season. Lose to the Bulldogs, and it’s a mediocre one.

Spurrier had loathed the Dawgs since his playing days at Florida, continued loathing them as the Gators’ head coach, and brought that loathing with him to Columbia. Unsurprisingly, South Carolina’s best football seasons in history coincided with the team winning four of five games against Georgia.

When you saw the Bulldogs coming up on the schedule, the intensity became palpable: It literally felt like the season was at stake.

Feelings aren’t facts, but this Ole Miss game certainly has that old Georgia feeling for me. It feels like it’s a game that could propel this season into the kind that will firmly and emphatically place the Shane Beamer Era on solid ground and lay the foundation for the program to move into the SEC’s upper rungs.

It’s also a game that could go the wrong way, setting the stage for a difficult stretch that could itself set the stage for another sub-.500 finish and lost postseason.

That’s why it represents a fork in the road.

That’s why we’re feeling that palpable intensity this week, that old Georgia feeling, that 2012 feeling, that “do or die” feeling.

Friends, it literally does feel like the season is at stake. Right now.

Remember what it felt like when we watched the Gamecocks walk off the field smiling and hugging while Georgia’s players and coaches made that grim walk back to the locker room?

We knew we had something fun on our hands.

Time to feel that feeling again, don’t you think?

Tell me what you think as South Carolina faces a fork in the road by writing me at [email protected].

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