Scott Davis: Seize the Day

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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It’s time.

It’s time to take what’s ours. It’s time to seize the day. It’s time to tap into that good carpe diem energy.

It’s time to go Dead Poets Society on the rest of the SEC.

Under Shane Beamer, South Carolina football has delivered some of the most thrilling, unexpected, unforgettable wins in the program’s history. Whenever the Gamecocks have appeared to be running out of steam during the Beamer years, they’ve hung a wild, ecstatic, unforeseen victory on the board.

These upsets haven’t just been random wins against favored opponents. In many instances, they’ve been massacres that left behind gruesome carnage, the kinds of thorough whippings that Georgia legend Vince Dooley used to refer to as “being taken behind the woodshed.”

In 2021, a previously reeling South Carolina calmly entered Williams-Brice Stadium and absolutely assassinated Florida 40-17 in a game that wasn’t even that close. In 2022, the heretofore struggling Gamecocks introduced Tennessee to the back of the woodshed in a 63-38 dismantling that also wasn’t that close.

This season, as soon as questions started bubbling up about Beamer’s program, South Carolina answered them: First with a 31-6 smackdown of Kentucky on the road, then later a 35-9 demolishment inside Oklahoma’s stadium.

These wins have been some of the most enjoyable that I’ve experienced in my four-plus decades as a South Carolina fan, and they cannot be diminished or dismissed. And yet there’s work to be done. In the SEC, there always is.

What we’ve been waiting on, of course, is for the program to take it all one step further.

We’ve been waiting to see the Gamecocks use the momentum they gain from these buzzworthy wins to drag the program into a higher realm, to begin taking back the SEC from the handful of teams who’ve owned it in recent years. Instead, it’s often seemed that the team steps forward only to step right backward.

That’s why we’re still waiting. Waiting to watch them seize the day.

And on Saturday night, under the lights of Williams-Brice Stadium and the stars of a South Carolina sky, they’ll have one more chance to seize it against a Texas A&M team that has yet to lose in Southeastern Conference play this season.

Is Saturday, at long last, the day we seize?

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The Shifting Pendulum

Friends, we can be honest with one another here.

This is a safe space for South Carolina fans.

And I have no trouble whatsoever revealing the honest truth to you right now: I feel confident.

I believe in this team. I tried, almost from force of habit, to dabble in pessimism after the Gamecocks frittered away what would have been a program-defining win in Tuscaloosa against the Crimson Tide a few weeks ago. But I couldn’t do it.

Just days – and maybe even hours – after South Carolina left Alabama at 3-3, I found myself looking at the upcoming game in Norman against the Oklahoma Sooners and thinking, “Why not?”

And after a restful bye and a couple of weeks to celebrate the big win on the Oklahoma plains, I’m thinking the exact same thing as I contemplate the 7-1 Aggies of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas entering Williams-Brice Stadium this weekend.

Why not?

It feels right, feels like it’s time, feels like the universe wants this.

Of course…

I’ve felt this exact same way before. And Texas A&M was involved then, too.

Back in 2022, I attended South Carolina’s win over the Aggies at W-B and left the stadium as energized as I’d been since I was a child watching the 1984 Gamecocks. I then wrote a stirring newsletter that was so filled with brimming confidence about South Carolina’s upcoming game against Missouri that I almost ended up expressing sympathy for what the Tigers and their fans were about to endure in the Palmetto State.

Your final, from Williams-Brice: Missouri 23, South Carolina 10.

It felt right then, too, felt like it was time, felt like the universe wanted it.

And then the pendulum swung abruptly back in the direction of disappointment. We know what the pendulum does. We live on the pendulum.

And yet here I am again, plugging in one more time to that joyous energy, that beautiful electricity.

I don’t just want to believe.

I do.

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Start the Origin Story

Heroes and villains aren’t born.

From the earliest folklore all the way through modern storytelling, we always see that heroes and villains are made. Something happens to them, and they act.

There’s always an origin story.

When you watch “The Godfather,” there’s a critical moment about halfway through the movie when Michael Corleone stops being a soft-spoken afterthought and becomes the freaking Godfather.

There’s that moment when Batman puts on the mask for the first time, when Luke Skywalker grabs hold of the lightsaber.

When the moment arrives, you answer the call.

The greatest teams in sports were not born – somewhere, way back through a distant history, they answered the call. They took what was theirs. Alabama was not always Alabama, Ohio State was not always Ohio State, and Notre Dame was not always Notre Dame.

There was a moment, captured decades ago in dusty black and white, when those programs became what we know them to be.

There’s no reason why South Carolina can’t become something else.

To do it, they’ll have to take it by force.

They’ll have to seize the day.

What better day than Saturday?

Tell me how you feel as the Gamecocks get ready for Texas A&M by writing me at [email protected].

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