Scott Davis: Heroic season ends with bad guys winning

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 (sign up here) and a column during football season that’s published each Monday on GamecockCentral.com.

This was not supposed to be the ending.

This story was supposed to have a happy finale. We’d already seen it in our minds: The Gamecocks hugging each other on the sidelines, an exuberant Shane Beamer hoisting a Citrus Bowl trophy, video clips of dancing in the locker room, South Carolina fans high fiving into the Orlando night, all the images we’d need to keep us warm throughout a long, lonely winter.

We knew what we were watching when we tuned in at 3 pm Eastern on New Year’s Eve. The most delightful, unexpected, joyous Gamecock football season ever would conclude with a 10th win, something that doesn’t come often around here, and Beamer’s program would explode into the offseason with unprecedented confidence and feel-good vibes surrounding it.

Instead, the bad guys won.

Villainy was victorious. The scoreboard read Illinois 21, South Carolina 17 as the clock ran out, and Gamecock fans walked away with a gnawing, chilly feeling in the center of their stomachs, a feeling that they’d just watched the wrong ending to the right movie.

Given the opportunity to reward South Carolina’s long-suffering fan base with a program-defining bowl win, the universe instead rewarded petty gamesmanship, rule-bending, refereeing incompetence, smug taunting and outright wickedness. A fairy tale season ended with the heroes in retreat, and the rogues in triumph.

This was like a “Game of Thrones” episode, only not as addictively entertaining.

As a villain, Illinois head coach Bret Bielema made for a papier mâché bad guy – more cocky punk than fire-breathing evildoer, like an arrogant, mouthy dork in elementary school who would always get a beatdown on the playground after he ran his mouth one too many times.

Only this time, the humbling never arrived for Bielema and his Illini. The comeuppance never came up.

They’ll return to Champaign with a 10th win of their own, secure in the belief that their tactic for making constant defensive substitutions nearly every time the Gamecocks tried to run an offensive play was just good, sound strategy, a necessary ploy to find an advantage, a way to get under the skin of their opponents.

Whatever it was, it worked.

Bielema’s players jogged on and off the field with robotic regularity, frustrating the South Carolina offense’s ability to get into any kind of rhythm and aided by a Big 12 officiating crew that inexplicably did nothing to stop the madness.

Time and time again, the Illini defense kept sending in subs for as long as 15 seconds while a referee calmly stood over the football, denying the Gamecocks the opportunity to hike the ball as the play clock ticked towards zero.

I’ve been watching football for more than four decades and have never seen anything even remotely similar happen throughout four quarters.

As Beamer grew ever more animated in response to the shenanigans, Bielema then did the unthinkable for a veteran coach of a Power 5 school in a big-time bowl game. While pretending to check on an injured player, the Illinois coach wandered towards the South Carolina sideline and repeatedly – and emphatically – made the official refereeing signal for substitutions to insult the Gamecocks. The message: Yeah, we’re bending the rules, and while we’re at it, @%^$ you.

“In all my years of coaching, I’ve never seen that happen,” Beamer would say after the game of Bielema’s clinic in unsportsmanlike conduct.

And what did your refereeing crew do while Bielema embarrassed himself and his university?

They did the same thing they’d been doing all game in regard to the substitution overload.

They did absolutely nothing.

Even the ABC announcing and sideline team was aghast at Bielema’s antics, with play-by-play man Mark Jones wondering aloud why the officials are often so quick to flag players with taunting but wouldn’t penalize Bielema for walking almost onto the Gamecock sideline to jeer South Carolina’s coach.

Just moments after Bielema’s professional wrestling moment, the Gamecocks were forced to use a timeout to avoid receiving a delay of game penalty due to still more late substitutions by the Illinois defense.

This resulted in Bielema and his coaching colleagues setting a world record for sneers, smirks and mocking smiles – a loathsome moment I’ll never forget and that almost caused me to hurl my television through the front door. South Carolina certainly could have used that timeout late in the fourth quarter when trying to snuff out a final Illinois drive and mount a comeback.

But like the Gamecocks’ hopes for a 10-win season, it had vanished.

None of this should take away from the effort of the Illinois players, who often looked like the better team in Orlando on Tuesday. South Carolina had opportunities of its own to go win the football game, and they ultimately couldn’t get it done. Under normal circumstances, we’d be congratulating the Illini, feeling grateful for all of the big wins we watched this season and looking forward to 2025.

But for Gamecock fans, this game delivered the same eerie, ghoulish sensation that a September loss to LSU did – a feeling that sometimes the world just seems intent on collapsing on top of our heads. That one had also featured a confounding series of decisions by the referees, a vanishing fourth-quarter lead, and a grotesque, mouthy opposing coach running off the field in victory.

Beamer’s heroic team did so much in 2024 to change the narrative of South Carolina football from one of curses and calamities to one of joy and uplift. The season finale deserved a better ending.

Instead, the bad guys are smiling today.

And the good guys won’t have another chance to write a new ending for nine long, cold months.

The Shane Beamer Game Balls of the Week

When an opposing coach makes the baffling decision to walk nearly onto my team’s sidelines to taunt my football team about the fact that he is bending the rules to his advantage, I want my own head coach to let him know he’s treading on dangerous ground. And that’s exactly what Shane Beamer did, which is why in a day woefully short on big plays, we’ll toss our first Game Ball to…

Shane Beamer – It’s no secret to any of us that Beamer’s an emotional coach: It’s both his superpower and an occasional challenge for him, but all in all, it’s probably what we love the most about him. Still, as rowdy as he’s gotten in four seasons as the South Carolina leader, he’s never been even close to as fired up and ready to rumble as he was after Bielema’s clown show. Though the Gamecocks did score a touchdown soon after Beamer’s angry response, they weren’t able to harness the emotion and close out the Illini. I wish they’d been able to match their coach’s energy on the field.

Finishing a Play – Early in the game, Illini quarterback Luke Altmyer connected on a 59-yard pass that looked like a certain touchdown. Instead, South Carolina’s Jalen Kilgore raced to the football and tackled Illinois’ Hank Beatty at roughly the one-inch line. Just delaying the inevitable, right? Nope. On the next play, the Illini turned the ball over. Kilgore’s willingness to finish the play wiped seven points off the board.

Having a Backup Plan – My wife and I have spent the past few New Year’s Eves making fondue at home in celebration of the arrival of another year. And though it didn’t wipe away the sting from this deeply unsatisfying game, melted cheese and chocolate sauce did go a long way toward turning the night back around. You always need a backup plan in case things don’t go well.

The Bret Bielema Deflated Balls of the Week

No explanations needed, friends. Let’s get right into it…

Bret Bielema – Bielema has passed through my life for years without ever making any kind of impact on my emotions one way or the other.

As Wisconsin’s coach, he seemed like a waddling throwback to the Big 10’s old-school roots.

After he moved on to Arkansas, I watched Steve Spurrier’s 2013 South Carolina team hang a 52-7 pounding on his Razorbacks, and it often seemed like his wife was in the news more than his program was during his time in Fayetteville.

At Illinois, he’d been a similarly under-the-radar presence while steadily resurrecting the program. Let’s just say I wasn’t expecting him to be the story of this year’s Citrus Bowl. Now? I’ll be rooting for the Illini to go 0-12 next season. If Clemson was Illinois’ next opponent, it’s unclear who I’d be pulling for in the game.

Not One, But Two Officiating Debacles in the Same Season – As memorable as this season was for South Carolina, it was undeniably marred by two of the most oddly officiated games I’ve ever witnessed. This one wasn’t as stomach-turning as the LSU game was, when it genuinely felt like the referees skewed the outcome of the football game.

But it was definitely another weird showing from the guys in black and white, one that left South Carolina’s players, coaches, fans and even the ABC announcing crew in complete mystification. If the Football Gods exist, they’ll give us a break from this chaos next season and just let the games be decided by the players on the field.

Not So Special Day for Special Teams – Shane Beamer’s squads usually thrive on special teams, but it wasn’t a special day for the unit in Orlando. The Gamecocks had a field goal attempt clank against the uprights, failed to convert a fake field goal and ran a risky trick play on a kickoff return that wound up not delivering any better field position than they would have gotten if they’d just taken a knee in the end zone.

The Continuing Devaluation of Bowl Games – For years now, bowl games have seemed increasingly superfluous as college football moved to a playoff system to decide its champion. And now that the playoff field has been expanded from four teams to 12, the bowl games that remain seem ever more meaningless.

But the introduction of NIL payments and the Transfer Portal have lent an enhanced air of ridiculousness to these exhibitions.

This year’s bowl season seemed completely overshadowed by news of which players were transferring to new destinations, which ones were declaring for the NFL Draft, which ones were returning to the schools where they already were (complete with “official announcements” to let us all know they weren’t going anywhere), and which players had opted out of bowl game competition to avoid injury.

Key South Carolina contributors Rocket Sanders and Kyle Kennard opted out of the Citrus Bowl, while Nick Emmanwori played the first half but not the second.

As for the games themselves, they’ve been largely unentertaining, sloppy affairs. At this point, the bowl games seem almost totally divorced from the season that preceded them – it’s like they floated in from space and landed inside our televisions, complete with new players, and in some cases, new coaches – and it’s getting harder and harder to take them seriously.

Moving Forward

Now, for those of us who love the University of South Carolina, we’ll have plenty of time in the coming months to remember and take very seriously all of the unforgettable moments the Gamecocks gave us in 2024. It was a season that I’ll take with me to the grave, such a strange, glorious, fascinating thing to behold.

We’ll have nine months to remember those moments. And we will.

But today, with a New Year arriving, we’re still pained by a story that didn’t end the way it was supposed to end.

A heroic season ended with the bad guys smiling, chuckling, sneering and holding up a trophy.

If there’s going to be a happy ending, it will have to come in 2025.

Tell me how you’re feeling after a disappointing Citrus Bowl by writing me at [email protected].