Scott Davis: South Carolina survived April

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.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’ve always enjoyed the annual Gamecock Club springtime meeting circuit.

When you love college football, your calendar transforms into a series of milestones. The earliest winter months – just after the season ends – are reserved for reading and fretting and obsessing over recruiting. Then you head directly into spring practice (allowing you the glorious opportunity to read, fret and obsess over new starters, position battles, schemes and additions to the coaching staff).

For decades, the Gamecock Club speaking tour that took up the late spring and early summer weeks was our last stop before a long dry spell in the dog days until August practice arrived. So, we did our superfan duties and read, fretted and obsessed over everything the head football coach said during his yearly stops at meetings in far-flung parts of the Palmetto State.

It was the only thing bridging the gap until the fall, the final leg of the journey.

And you had to pay attention to the stories emerging from each meeting, because you never knew which one would be worth your complete focus. Maybe the Greenville meeting might not produce any electrifying news, but the Myrtle Beach meeting would get you so fired up that you started contemplating buying an extra set of season tickets. So you read everything.

Yes, it was a simpler time.

Now, of course, these old-timey milestones seem like vestiges of a prehistoric era. Now, football season never actually ends. We’ll move from Gamecock Club meetings into the SEC Meetings, then we’ll talk about future schedules for a few weeks, then there will probably be a week where everyone’s speculating about more conference expansion stories, then SEC Media Days will be here, and then before you know it, it’s August and we’re practicing.

In days of yore, you could count on the coach – whether his name was Brad Scott or Lou Holtz or Steve Spurrier or even Will Muschamp – to chat about the starting lineup or the difficult schedule during the club speaking tour, and nothing particularly earth-shattering would get said, but most of us would find ways to be excited about it anyway.

Current head coach Shane Beamer is talking about those things, too. But he’s also talking about something else, something he has to talk about, something every coach at every college in America has to talk about now.

He’s talking about the Transfer Portal.

Escaping April

Up until 2022 or so, college football fans felt anxiety only during the season itself, and then again on National Signing Day. Would that high-wattage recruit who was leaning to South Carolina make good on his commitment or pull a last-minute surprise and head to Georgia?

Other than that, you could cruise through the rest of the year without too much worry beyond hoping everyone on the roster stayed healthy.

Not anymore.

Now you’ve got to survive a series of Transfer Portal “windows” in which players have the opportunity to pack their bags and head elsewhere, including to any of the schools you might be facing on the field in a couple of months.

The spring window for transfers closed on May 1, and South Carolina’s coaches and fans breathed a collective sigh of relief when the last second ticked off the clock on April 30. The Gamecocks hung onto every expected starter and key contributor, and should enter the season with a full complement of players.

These days, just surviving the spring with your starting lineup intact is no longer a given.

While making his way through Gamecock Club meetings around the state, Beamer has admitted how disorienting the new setup can be for coaches like him. We’re in undiscovered country, and no one knows that more than college football coaches.

At the Charleston Gamecock Club meeting this week, Beamer said, “When that portal is open at the end of April for two weeks, you can get a phone call and it can be somebody you counted on being a starter for you that’s leaving. And thankfully, we didn’t have that. But you’ve just got to prepare.”

He added, “It’s certainly a challenge and it’s one that all of us as coaches are learning there’s no manual to refer to. I don’t call my Dad who coached for tons of years and ask how he handled the transfer portal or NIL, because he didn’t.”

South Carolina escaped April this time.

But for every college program, there may come an April when escape is impossible.

Anxiety Overload

If coaches don’t have a manual for guidance during these changing times, fans don’t even have the Cliff’s Notes summary of a manual. We couldn’t even create a PowerPoint presentation with an outline of what would be in the manual.

Many of us now feel like we’re living in a chaotic universe in which anything could happen at any time. At this point, I don’t think I’d be surprised to see South Carolina’s starting quarterback transfer to the opposing team at halftime of a game and come out for the second half wearing the other team’s uniform. There’s a vague professional wrestling vibe that is hovering around the game at present: Who are the heroes and who are the villains? Who knows?

As a result, it feels like the sport has become only about anxiety – about worrying whether this guy is coming or going, or this guy’s NIL deal is robust enough, or this guy is gelling with his position coach enough to warrant remaining in Columbia.

Of course, we’re not the only fans who feel anxious. Every fan everywhere does.

This is the Age of Anxiety in college football.

The ground beneath our feet seems slippery.

And until we reach firmer soil, this is probably the thing we’re going to be talking about the most. Like you, I’d love to be talking about the schedule and the starters.

But this is the new world in which we live, and these are the topics we have.

At least we survived April. This time.

Tell me your thoughts on surviving April by writing me at [email protected].

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