Scott Davis: Shane Beamer's Gamecocks aka The Escape Artists

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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They’ve done it again.

If there’s been any single, solitary thing about the Shane Beamer Era at South Carolina that has been at all predictable, it’s been this: Whenever you’re ready to start counting this team out, they count themselves back in.

What’s predictable is this team’s complete, utter unpredictability.

Back in Beamer’s first season, most of us had consigned the Gamecocks to intensive care following beatdowns from Georgia, Tennessee and Texas A&M, an ugly loss to Kentucky and an uninspiring one-point win against a dreadful Vandy. Then an adrenaline shot seemed to have suddenly been administered by a higher power, and we watched in complete mystification as South Carolina drilled Florida and beat longtime SEC nemesis Auburn before routing North Carolina in a bowl game.

They’d escaped certain death for the first time under Beamer.

It happened again just a year later, in 2022. You’d have struggled to find anyone anywhere ready to buy stock in Beamer Ball 2.0 after yet another late-season no-show against Missouri and an epic humiliation in Gainesville to Florida that put the season on the brink of the abyss. On cue, the Gamecocks ran Tennessee out of Williams-Brice Stadium, stunned Clemson on the road and nearly upset Notre Dame in the Gator Bowl.

That was Escape No. 2, and it was even more shocking than the first.

Predictably, the team left itself an almost impossible degree of difficulty when it started the 2023 season at an ugly 2-6, and though they didn’t quite dig themselves out of the hole to return to the postseason, they still won three straight to put themselves in position to get there in the season finale. By then, we’d gotten so used to the late-season heroics that we were actually surprised they didn’t complete the cycle.

The 2024 season seemed to be headed directly toward the cliff’s edge in the very first game, when South Carolina nearly found a way to lose to Old Dominion in what would have been by far the most embarrassing moment of Beamer’s tenure. They survived, then inexplicably rolled up Kentucky on the road to pump life back into our hearts.

That life sagged after devastating defeats to LSU and Alabama and an absolute mail-in performance against Ole Miss.

So surely none of us could have been shocked on Saturday to watch the Gamecocks not merely defeat the Oklahoma Sooners on the road but humble them to such a degree that OU fans spent this past week talking about firing coaches. Right?

Escape No. 3 seems to be at hand. And if South Carolina wins two more games in its remaining five to return to the postseason, we can make it official.

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Defining the Experience

Question: Do you ever get used to The Shane Beamer Experience?

Does it ever become old hat, these stunning wins, these dramatic mood swings, these ups and downs and zigs and zags? Do you ever spend so long on the roller coaster that you can no longer walk on solid ground again?

A couple of weeks ago, I nicknamed the feeling of watching South Carolina football under Beamer as The Shane Beamer Experience – essentially a ride on one of those Japanese bullet trains where sometimes you’re enjoying the dopamine rush of soaring through the countryside, and other times you’re a little queasy and your stomach’s in tatters because of what’s happening to your body…and you never quite know which one of those feelings is coming.

A more proper definition, I think, of life aboard the Experience is this: However you feel right this minute, you’re probably getting ready to feel the opposite. It’s almost like that old saw about the weather: “Don’t like the weather? Wait five minutes.”

If the Gamecocks are enduring a hopeless stretch, wait five minutes. They’re probably getting ready to upset somebody. On the flip side, if you notice yourself starting to feel a little too good about the progress of the South Carolina program, well…maybe take a cold shower.

True, it would be easier on our blood pressure if the team didn’t find itself in need of a Great Escape every season.

But would it be this addictive?

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Are We Not Entertained?

As the Will Muschamp Era began to drift into a circling tailspin, I wrote a despondent column after a loss to North Carolina in which I invoked Russell Crowe as Maximus in “Gladiator,” bellowing to the bloodthirsty crowd, “Are you not entertained?”

The resounding answer Gamecock fans gave to that question during the Muschamp years was clear and emphatic: No.

Not at all.

There’s no other way to say it: Gamecock football in those days was boring. It was lifeless, inert, devoid of personality and color. There were solid players on those teams who did the program proud and represented the garnet and black to their utmost, and there’s no doubt those coaches tried to make it work, but as a whole the program simply didn’t register anywhere (a particularly grim outcome for South Carolina fans when you consider what was happening in the Upstate at the time).

You could turn away from their games with ease, even tune out entire seasons. Many did.

For better or worse, South Carolina football under Shane Beamer is entertaining to an almost painful degree. You can’t turn away, ever. Not for a second. Something crazy is about to happen, something you never thought would occur in your wildest imaginings.

It might not always be what you hoped.

But you will want to stick around to see. Like one of those ‘80s prime time soap operas in the mold of “Dynasty” or “Dallas,” South Carolina football has become a full-blown saga of glorious strangeness that demands our attention and receives it every week. As a result, Beamer has easily become the most popular Gamecock football coach of my lifetime who is not named the Old Ball Coach.

We may never know if we’re going to be soaring or nauseous.

But we don’t want to get off the train.

The Experience is always an unforgettable ride.

Is another Great Escape in the future? Will we even need one?

Tell me what you think will happen in the next few weeks by writing me at [email protected].

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