Scott Davis: When does the happy ending arrive?

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.

---

The saga continues.

The saga always continues.

Oh, it was close. For a few brief moments on Saturday, it looked like South Carolina might just enjoy a heroic return home from a challenging journey. The Gamecocks – playing on the road in Tuscaloosa against the defending SEC champions and most storied football program in the game – put an unexpected scare into the almighty Alabama Crimson Tide, just as they’d done weeks earlier against LSU.

Along with Georgia, Alabama and LSU have comprised the most important SEC programs for the last decade, and this year’s edition of the South Carolina Gamecocks not only competed with both but flirted with defeating each of them.

But in both contests, South Carolina’s leads slipped away late, mistakes and miscues mounted, and Gamecock fans were left without the opportunity to shower their team with a hero’s welcome. When does the happy ending arrive?

In the classic hero’s journey tale that human beings have been telling each other around campfires since the beginning of time, a protagonist goes on a quest, wins a monumental victory and returns home transformed. Everything changes after the journey – it’s the moment when the hero becomes the hero. But Gamecock fans are still waiting for the fairy tale to come true in 2024.

We’re still waiting for the good guys – our own hometown heroes – to finish the story.

The final score this time – Alabama 27, South Carolina 25 – felt especially cruel considering the large number of missed opportunities the Gamecocks couldn’t capitalize upon. It was there for the taking, and then it wasn’t. Everything was about to change for our heroes, and then it didn’t.

Watching this team during both the LSU and Alabama losses, you found yourself muttering the same thing over and over again, almost as a kind of prayer: “Somebody’s gonna make a play right here. Somebody’s gonna make a play.”

Both times, that decisive play never came.

If there’s a positive storyline to hold onto, it’s that the players on this team compete and continue to compete even when the villains seem to have the upper hand. They’ve never waved the white flag once this year, even during a largely non-competitive disappointment against Ole Miss. That’s not something you could always count on from South Carolina teams across the years, and it’s a credit to the culture coach Shane Beamer has instilled here.

But thus far, the breakthrough victory that this program and its fans have so desperately craved and needed remains elusive. The program-defining win lingers just out of reach.

The journey rolls forward. Our would-be heroes march on, looking for a break. The rest of us are left to wonder what could possibly happen next.

And the saga continues.

This particular saga always continues.

[See what fans are saying about the game on The Insiders Forum!]

The South Carolina Gamecock Fans Game Balls of the Week

While we continue to hold out for our heroes to finish the story, let’s toss a few Game Balls to…

South Carolina Gamecock Fans – As a reward for supporting this program through thick and (mostly) thin for more than a century, despite never seeing the team win the SEC while also watching their in-state archrivals win the national championship twice in the last decade, Gamecock fans in 2024 have been asked to endure gut-wrenching, stomach-turning losses to two of the SEC’s historic cornerstones after their team led both of them in the fourth quarter. Who is writing this particular story, Beelzebub?

Defensive Pressure – The South Carolina defense harassed, bullied and ultimately punished one-time Heisman hopeful Jalen Milroe, sacking the Alabama QB four times, bringing him down for a safety and picking him off twice. The Gamecock defense contained Milroe far more effectively than did the vaunted Georgia Bulldog defense, which Milroe thrashed for 374 passing yards a couple of weeks ago in this same stadium. That effort should have been enough to lead this team to a season-changing victory.

Answered Prayers? – With just seconds remaining and down by two points, South Carolina sent an electric jolt of terror into the Bryant-Denny Stadium crowd by perfectly executing an onside kick attempt to get the ball back and give itself one last chance to craft a hero’s narrative. The play almost seemed to have dropped from the heavens like an answered prayer. Of course, the Gamecocks still needed to put points on the board to officially confirm the prayer had been heard.

Fight – After no-showing against Ole Miss, the team might have been expected to sleepwalk through a road contest against Alabama, especially after they fell behind by two touchdowns early in the game. Indeed, many of us expected just such an outcome. To their credit, these players sharpened their knives before taking the field, and they gave the Tide everything they wanted and then some. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. And on that note…

[Join GamecockCentral for great coverage, great community]

The “Close But No Cigar” Deflated Balls of the Week

Professional football offers its fans a little more clarity than college football does. When your NFL team loses, it’s a bad outcome. Period. It doesn’t matter who the opponent was, where the game was played, what uniforms anyone was wearing, who was injured, what the two franchises’ historical legacies look like or anything else. Losing is bad, it is not encouraging in any way, shape or form, and there are never any style points awarded for doing it. In the NFL, when you lose, you lose.

But for whatever reason, college football fans always feel vaguely pressured to accept certain losses from their team as being tolerable – we’re supposed to factor in intangibles like which program has better players, greater resources and a stronger history of success. Since the playing field is apparently uneven, we often feel like we’re grading these outcomes on a curve rather than just allowing ourselves to feel happy after wins and bad after losses.

Using these criteria, South Carolina fans have occasionally been gently encouraged by some parties to feel upbeat about such losses as the team has suffered to LSU and Alabama this year. Instead, let’s toss out a Deflated Ball to…

Any “This Team is Close” Narratives That Circulate This Week – Because the Gamecocks nearly defeated LSU and then nearly defeated Alabama in 2024, some observers have been sounding a mild drumbeat to embrace this squad as overachievers who are “close” to breaking through in the SEC.

And while I understand the desire to keep these players pushing forward with spirits high, surely we could forgive many Gamecock fans for being ready to celebrate actual breakthroughs in the SEC rather than metaphorical breakthroughs.

Let’s put it this way: Was Old Dominion “close” to being an SEC-caliber football team when it led the Gamecocks late in this year’s season opener at Williams-Brice before faltering by four points? Let’s see – no, the Monarchs are 2-4 this year playing a Sun Belt Conference schedule. They were not close.

I appreciate the fact that South Carolina’s players don’t surrender, keep battling and show competitive fire each week. Whether it means the team is close to breaking through in the conference or not remains to be seen. At some point, breaking through in the SEC requires actually doing it, not getting near it.

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

The Fumble Thing – It’s no secret that South Carolina quarterback LaNorris Sellers has struggled to protect the football in 2024, and the redshirt freshman lost two more fumbles on Saturday and put another on the ground to boot. The turnovers have often had a deadly effect on the team’s ability to turn tough games into victories.

And it hasn’t just been Sellers – backup quarterback Robby Ashford also lost a fumble when he started against Akron. Regardless, the trend has become a frustrating backdrop in South Carolina’s season. And speaking of frustrating trends…

The Sack Thing – South Carolina quarterbacks have been sacked often in 2024, and Alabama added four more sacks to the tally on Saturday. There’s also been an odd unwillingness to name a culprit for all these sacks this year – both South Carolina’s coaches and even some media observers have at times refrained from placing the blame on the offensive line or the quarterbacks, often referring vaguely to “perimeter blocking” and other elements that may be causing trouble.

It’s as though the program’s long legacy of offensive line struggles has encouraged some alternative takes this year just to keep things interesting, but ultimately, the bottom line remains the same: South Carolina is having difficulty keeping its quarterback upright this season, and it’s hurting the team’s ability to win football games.

In the end, this story concluded in much the same way as it too often has for Gamecock fans.

They watched their heroes hit the road on a difficult journey. They watched them battle. They watched them struggle. They watched them compete.

But they did not watch them return home after a decisive, life-changing victory that could change the course of history.

In the classic hero’s quest, the protagonist always – eventually – achieves that breakthrough.

But in this saga, the journey continues. March on.

Tell me how you’re feeling after another close loss by writing me at [email protected].

Discuss this column on The Insiders Forum!