Scott Davis: Battling for a Win ... and for Relevance

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 (the following is his most recent) and a column during football season that’s published on GamecockCentral.com. To receive Scott’s newsletter every Friday, sign up here.

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What happened?

As crazy as this may sound when we’re completing the first week of February, it’s nonetheless the hard, cold truth: The South Carolina men’s basketball team has yet to record a win in 2025.

It’s all too real.

And the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Five is not the only category in which the Gamecocks are still waiting to notch a victory. At 0-9 in Southeastern Conference play, the team is thus far winless at the halfway point of league competition, too.

Gamecock fans began the season wondering if the program could return to the NCAA Tournament for the second year in a row (something that hasn’t happened in nearly 30 years). But forget March Madness. At this point, we just want to see the boys in garnet and black record a W in the SEC – any W.

While their chances of finishing the entire season without an SEC victory are admittedly slim, the fact that we’re even discussing the possibility this late in the season is a remarkable turn of events for a program that by all accounts seemed to be building towards something special just a year ago.

Remember 2024? It seems like a lifetime ago now.

Not even 11 months back, South Carolina coach Lamont Paris was named the SEC Coach of the Year and signed a new contract deal after overseeing a powerful turnaround in his second season at the helm. The team roared into the NCAA Tournament for the first time in seven years and threatened to win the league outright.

After the doldrums of the final few Frank Martin seasons and a rocky first year under Paris, it looked like Gamecock men’s basketball might finally be ready to return to relevance. The fan base was energized and hopeful for the first time since the program’s unimaginable run to the Final Four in 2017. The future, finally, was bright.

Instead, we’re here, waiting for an SEC win as February grinds onward.

And as we often are when contemplating this program, we’re wondering what happens next.

Dream Season Gives Way to Nightmare

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Despite South Carolina’s surprise run to the NCAA Tournament last year, the team still entered the 2024-25 campaign with some question marks.

The Gamecocks lost star guard Meechie Johnson – a second-team All-SEC performer in 2024 – to the transfer portal in a bizarre situation in which Johnson returned back to the team he’d transferred to South Carolina from. (In an even weirder twist, Johnson recently made the decision to step away from the Buckeyes for what were described as personal reasons).

The media – which never quite seems to know what to make of South Carolina men’s basketball – predicted the team to finish 11th in the 16-team SEC during the preseason. And while that was certainly a step in the right direction after the media had picked the program to finish dead last in the league during the 2023-24 preseason, it’s still worth noting that the Gamecocks certainly weren’t a trendy pick to make a deep run into March this year.

But this?

No one foresaw this.

True, some of us wondered what, exactly, might be awaiting us after the Gamecocks inexplicably started the season with a home loss to the North Florida Ospreys of something called the ASUN Conference (where the Ospreys currently languish in seventh place).

But the ship seemed to have been righted by December.

South Carolina stunned archrival Clemson in Columbia just before Christmas – a victory that looked like a genuine Signature Win for Paris, particularly in light of Clemson’s Elite 8 appearance last season. But the programs went in different directions after that game. The Tigers are currently 10-2 in the ACC and 18-5 overall and will be heading back to the NCAA Tournament again.

And South Carolina is once again fighting to be noticed as March looms.

It’s an unfortunately familiar position for the program and its fans.

Can We Renew Relevance?

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The true battle for the men’s basketball program at South Carolina rarely seems to be for a spot in the NCAA Tournament.

It’s for relevance.

Football is and will always be king in Columbia, despite the university’s deep inconsistencies in the sport for more than a century. Gamecock fans always pay attention to football, sometimes even more when the team is struggling than when it’s winning.

Baseball has been a core focus for Gamecock fans since the 1970s, and after Ray Tanner orchestrated two national championships and six College World Series appearances in more than 15 seasons at the helm, the springtime sport has achieved lasting importance in the hearts of the fan base.

With its season crammed between those two behemoths, the men’s basketball program has been fighting for attention for more than a generation. There’s no other way to say it: You need to go back 50 years to the height of the Frank McGuire Era to find a moment when the program was consistently on the national radar screen.

In the five decades since – FIVE! – the South Carolina men have averaged about one appearance in the Tournament every 10 years. To review, 68 teams make the tourney every year. It just isn’t that hard for any school from a major conference to make the postseason at least a couple of times a decade.

And it’s an unavoidable reality that the spectacular explosion of Dawn Staley’s women’s basketball program onto the national stage has made it even more difficult for the Gamecock men to win hearts, minds and eyeballs every January, February and March.

Though we shouldn’t compare the two, it’s hard not to look at the success of Staley’s program and wonder if at least a reasonable facsimile of it couldn’t be conducted on the men’s side. Dawn inherited a program that wasn’t just irrelevant, it was barely alive. Her teams compete in a brutal and rugged SEC that is annually the nation’s best women’s basketball conference.

And yet her program not only wins, it inspires fierce loyalty and devotion from Gamecock fans – something that has simply eluded the men’s program since McGuire retired.

After another lost campaign, South Carolina men’s basketball will start next season fighting for the same thing it always seems to be fighting for.

It isn’t championships or tournament berths. It’s relevance.

Tell me what you think about this disappointing men’s basketball season by writing me at [email protected].

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