Scott Davis: Too soon for a bye week? Not this year.

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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I’m about to say something you’ll almost never hear me say.

You ready for this? Take a deep breath and close your eyes. Here we go: I’m happy South Carolina has a Bye Week this weekend.

Yeah, I said it.

Me, the person who actually wants more bowl games, not less. The person who would be fine with a 36-game football schedule. The person who has written repeatedly in this column, “It’s almost never football season, so savor it while it’s here.”

Could we possibly already need a week away from the game? This early? Just four games into a 12-game season? Who needs a Bye Week after four games?

I’ll tell you who does: I do. South Carolina’s football team does. And my guess is, you do, too.

I need it and you need it because these first four games have grabbed us right in our emotional core and squeezed out every single emotion we can summon. We’ve felt joy, sadness, terror, hope, love, hatred, annoyance, boredom, exhilaration and everything else in between, coming all the way back around to hope again.

I’m exhausted. I’m also excited. I may also be slightly nauseous. Regardless, it feels like I’ve been awake for 72 straight hours.

After feeling troubled and mildly dismayed by the team’s sloppy opener against Old Dominion, I found myself floating on a pink cloud following the rout of Kentucky in Lexington. The LSU game took me to heaven, then Purgatory, then hell, then left me for dead in a ditch on the side of a lonely country road. The thorough dismantling of Akron breathed life back into my lungs.

How will I get through eight more games of this?

As for the team, they enter the first of two Bye Weeks in 2024 needing rest for their battered bodies. South Carolina’s two most important pieces on offense – quarterback LaNorris Sellers and running back Rocket Sanders – are battling ankle injuries that could derail the team’s designs on a bowl berth.

Oh, and there’s the little matter of that upcoming October schedule.

Have you seen it?

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Gauntlet of All Gauntlets

Every Southeastern Conference football schedule is brutal.

That’s why I gave up complaining about the schedule a decade or so ago. Whoever shows up on this thing from year to year will be difficult to defeat. If it’s Arkansas or Auburn or Florida or Tennessee, it’ll be a handful.

But this October gauntlet of Ole Miss followed by Alabama on the road followed by Oklahoma on the road is about as stomach-turning a stretch as I can recall the Gamecocks enduring in many years. If ever there was a time to take a breather, fine-tune the strategy, regroup and get ready for an all-out war, this is that time.

There have been moments during this short campaign when South Carolina has seemed capable of not just securing a bowl bid in 2024 but perhaps even surprising us with a memorable run. That’s why we’ll all need to lock arms and stay the course should this season hit a wall over the next few weeks. After all, few national observers would be surprised if South Carolina emerged from the October onslaught at 3-4.

But if that is indeed the result, there will still be plenty to play for now rather than later. There will still be time to turn this season into something that propels the program into an optimistic and hopeful offseason.

I’m using the Bye Week to remind myself of that again and again.

And to meditate.

Things might get worse before they get better, and it’s darkest just before the dawn.

That’s what I’ll be saying to myself this weekend, over and over and over. Maybe by the time that Ole Miss game gets here, I’ll actually believe it.

[Win two tickets to the South Carolina-Ole Miss football game]

All Aboard the Shane Beamer Experience

When Shane Beamer was hired to lead the program at the end of the 2020, some enterprising fans started sending around memes that read, “Get On Board the Shane Train!”

I recently dubbed that train The Shane Beamer Experience, and a ride on the Experience is, if nothing else, entertaining. At times it feels like you’re soaring on one of those bullet trains that race across Japan. At other times – like last season, when the Gamecocks went 5-7 and missed the postseason – the ride’s a little bumpy.

But there’s no other way to say it: South Carolina football has simply been more interesting to follow since Beamer took the reins of the program. There are highs and lows, and the drama is thick and powerful and riveting, and the characters are memorable, and the climaxes feel unlike anything we can remember.

Just a few years ago, back in 2010s, I wrote a column about how it seemed like many of the high-profile athletic programs at South Carolina simply weren’t entertaining at that moment. I loved the teams and wanted them to win…but they weren’t particularly remarkable, and their games didn’t stick in your head when they were over. Some of them – yes – were a little dull.

South Carolina football under Beamer is never dull.

And sure, I’d be happy to follow a dull team that went 13-0 and won the SEC.

But I’m also happy to be following a program and a coach that has seized the imagination of its fan base. If there was one thing that was abundantly clear before, during and after that LSU game, it was this: We care about this team.

We care about them as much as we’ve cared about any of our favorite teams from years past. Right now, in 2024, South Carolina fans care as much about Gamecock football as they ever have (and that’s a remarkable statement).

If the Experience takes us on a ride to a bowl game in 2024, with this schedule and with all of the challenges that the program has faced in recent years, there is no limit to the amount of love we will give them.

We want to give them our whole hearts.

And I can tell you a secret, right now, since we’ve got a week off to think about it.

We already have.

Tell me how you’re feeling as the Bye Week arrives by writing me at [email protected].

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