Scott Davis: That's my quarterback

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.

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Remember that time Terrell Owens, struggling to put a tough Dallas Cowboys loss behind him during a postgame interview, broke down defending his teammate and quarterback, Tony Romo?

Owens warned the media that piling all the blame for the loss on Romo would be unfair, and suddenly the moment overwhelmed him and left him battling tears. “That’s my quarterback,” he said plaintively, launching a million or two memes and kickstarting another round of conversations about his own well-being.

The moment seemed odd when it happened way back in 2008, particularly coming from the rarely empathetic T.O., and yet I found myself thinking about it when I watched footage of Spencer Rattler smiling and nodding in determination when he learned last weekend that he’d been drafted by the New Orleans Saints in the fifth round of this year’s NFL Draft.

That’s my quarterback.

Yes, I was thinking it. And I won’t say whether I got teary-eyed or felt my lips trembling like Owens did when he uttered the now legendary phrase, but I’ll let you hazard a guess on that.

In today’s increasingly unrecognizable college sports landscape, it’s more difficult than it used to be for fans to connect on a deep level with individual players. The roster seems to be changing by the second. The Transfer Portal is churning and the draft is always looming and sometimes it seems like we never quite get a chance to click with the players who wear South Carolina uniforms.

They’re here one day wearing the Gamecock helmet, and then they’re not and somebody else is, and every now and then it’s hard to remember who did what or when they did it.

But that wasn’t the way I felt about Rattler.

I cared about him – not just because he was the South Carolina quarterback, but because of the way he carried himself while he was here. He competed with poise and led with grace. He made me root for him. I wanted him to succeed. And as draft day approached, I realized I was more invested in him hearing his name called than I had been about any potential South Carolina draftee in memory.

I just wanted him to get a chance.

After everything he’d given this program, his teammates and his fans, and after everything he’d been through since signing with Oklahoma as a five-star recruit, he deserved one.

That chance came, finally, when the Saints called his name on Saturday. It came later than most of us thought it would, and later than he likely felt it should have.

But it came. And now his opportunity to live a lifelong dream is here.

It’s Been Awhile

The headline screamed off the screen on my iPhone:

Spencer Rattler Becomes First South Carolina QB Drafted in Over 30 Years.

I was scrolling my email after watching the draft proceedings when I noticed a news alert from Gamecock Central. Like the rest of you, I’m so inundated by email on a daily basis that it’s all but impossible for something to stop me in my tracks at this point, but that headline froze me in place.

Good Lord, had it really been more than three decades since a Gamecock quarterback was drafted by an NFL team? If you’re wondering why South Carolina hasn’t won the SEC in its 32 years in the league, that might be as good a place to start as any.

Just by hearing his name called, Rattler had already drifted into rarified territory for a South Carolina QB.

He made it across the finish line despite the Gamecocks slumping to a 5-7 finish in 2023, in a season when his offensive line’s struggles and the South Carolina running game’s occasional disappearance often left him scrambling to make plays for his team.

When Rattler arrived at South Carolina, some national media members had already dismissed him as a “me-first” player based on his high school persona and the tumultuous end to his Oklahoma career.

But that wasn’t the player we saw inside Williams-Brice Stadium.

Given ample opportunities to put his beleaguered offensive teammates on blast during a sinking 2023, Rattler instead defended them at every turn. I lost track of the times I witnessed him patting one of his peers on the helmet and offering a few whispers of encouragement.

It would have been easy for him to let the frustration engulf him.

If it ever did, we never saw it.

And somewhere along the way, whatever preconceived notions we may have had about him when he arrived had morphed into something else.

After the last two years, he became something else, something he’ll be forever now.

He was our quarterback.

From Obstacle to Opportunity

As the third and then the fourth round rolled by, Rattler remained on the Big Board, high atop just about every analyst’s “Best Players Available” list.

Finally, after yet another team passed on picking him, the NFL Network’s assembled talking heads began speculating on why he hadn’t been selected yet. Almost inevitably, some of them mentioned Rattler’s long-ago appearance as a high school student on a Netflix documentary called QB1.

The quarterback’s image had never recovered, some mused, though several of them also were quick to praise his maturity at South Carolina. A few days later, ESPN’s Adam Schefter offered a simpler analysis: The teams who truly needed quarterbacks all used first-round draft picks to select them, and Rattler just got caught in the shuffle.

Regardless of when he went, he now has an opportunity.

It’s been cited a million times, but it’s worth remembering that the greatest NFL player of all time – Tom Brady – was selected a round later than Rattler was, lingering until the sixth round before New England stumbled into him. San Francisco quarterback Brock Purdy, who led his team to the Super Bowl this year, was the last player picked in his draft.

Spencer Rattler now has his own chance.

What he does with it won’t have anything to do with Netflix, or the offensive lines he played behind in college, or whatever happened in Oklahoma. It will just be up to him.

And after watching him these last two years, I believe a simple chance is all he’ll need. Because I believe in him as a player and as a person.

I will root for him wherever goes.

Wherever he is, he’ll be the same thing to me as he was in Columbia: He’ll be my quarterback.

Tell me your thoughts on Spencer Rattler and the NFL Draft by writing me at [email protected].

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