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In this feature, columnist Scott Davis, who has followed USC sports for more than 30 years, provides readers with a humorous view of being a Gamecocks fan.

There's a simple and unmistakable rule when it comes to food, and it's this: If you constantly brag about how good a cook you are, you probably don't know how to cook.

Show me a consistently satisfied chef, and I'll show you someone who doesn't particularly care about the finished product.

Folks, this may shock you, but I feel like we can be honest with each other, so I'll just say it: Cooking is hard.

Almost all of the time, something you do will go wrong no matter how many times you've done it before - a seasoning will hit home a little too intensely, a piece of meat will get left over the fire a whisper of a second too long, a vegetable will go limp in the oven. If you cook on a daily basis, perfection will always elude you.

And for some reason, you keep trying to obtain it anyway.

What does this have to do with football? A lot, actually.

I was watching a cooking program on the obscure network Destination America the other day, and like most things do, it made me start thinking about football.

The show - BBQ Pitmasters, and its spin-off, BBQ Pit Wars - focuses on mostly overweight, mostly middle-aged guys who tour the barbecue circuit week after week, slaving over wood fires, trying to impress fickle judges and complaining about things like flavor profiles and proper injection techniques. As a mostly overweight, mostly middle-aged dude who loves eating and trying to cook barbecue, I'm obviously the show's target audience.

At first, I started seeing some of the most obvious parallels between barbecuing and football. For one thing, sometimes you're only as good as the meat that you cook. If you get handed a flabby piece of brisket, even your greatest skills as a chef might not coax excellence out of it.

By the same token, sometimes you're only as good as the players you recruit.

I don't want to call anyone out in particular, but let's just say there were quite a few flabby pieces of brisket on those Brad Scott and Lou Holtz rosters in the '90s and early 2000's. The ghosts of John Heisman and Bear Bryant couldn't have transformed some of those dudes into SEC champions.

Then again, part of being a good cook is knowing how to pick out the best ingredients you can find. Sometimes it might involve selecting the most expensive Porterhouse in the case. And sometimes it might involve finding a cheap, overlooked cut - a thin hanger steak stuck underneath a pile of ground beef in the back - that gives you a gut feeling it can provide deliciousness.

Sometimes you add an obvious All-American candidate like Marcus Lattimore or Jadeveon Clowney to the roster, and sometimes you have to dig in and uncover a gem that everyone else is ignoring, like Pharoh Cooper.

No matter which route you choose, you can be sure of this: Your audience only cares whether or not you made it taste good.

And that, finally, is the ultimate parallel between the two disciplines.

Just about everyone currently breathing likes to eat. And just about everyone currently breathing has an opinion about what they eat, plus likes and dislikes regarding food that don't actually make sense to anyone except them. That means your audience gets to be the judge, jury and executioner in deciding whether what you made tastes good.

Does someone not like mushrooms or mayonnaise? It's over - the dish stunk.

Is someone creeped out by meat that isn't cooked into oblivion? You lost.

It doesn't matter whether they're right or wrong (and for the record, anyone who likes meat cooked into oblivion is wrong and should be forced to defend themselves in front of an inquisition panel). It only matters whether or not they thought it tasted good.

Period.

The audience decides, and the reaction is swift, immediate and unchanging.

Does that sound familiar, football fans?

It's amazing how similar Yelp's online restaurant reviews are to football message boards.

Yelp is a mildly helpful and wildly annoying website that allows anyone who's eaten at a restaurant to weigh in on the experience. Many of the reviews are spectacularly negative, even for restaurants that are highly regarded.

At random, I picked out an actual Yelp review of a hugely popular restaurant in Atlanta where my wife and I eat on a regular basis and that is generally considered to be one of the best in the city by food writers and the public at large. Here's an excerpt (including the inevitable grammatical errors):

"So I ate here last night with my BF for our anniversary, and it was OKAY…We made a reservation so there was no wait , BUT the pregnant waiter that seated us was obviously in a BAD mood  ! I mean I understand your pregnant and it probably was a long day , but she literally looked like someone just told her her dog died .. ( she didn't even say hello ) that's rude….And my chicken and dumpling was good but SALTY !!! My food was so salty I had to force myself to eat it all !"

Now…

This is the one of the most successful restaurants in one of the 10 largest markets in America. It's staffed by people who have spent thousands of hours (literally) learning the craft of cooking in rigorous culinary schools, and has a waitstaff and hosting staff who are trained by the folks behind the most successful restaurant group in the city.

Does any of that matter to this person? Nope. Her chicken and dumplings were salty and her waitress was pregnant and lethargic. End of story.

It's easy for those of us on the sidelines to think we know how to properly feed a few hundred folks on a Friday night, or to execute a winning touchdown drive. All we have to do is simply make a declaration - "This doesn't work for me" - and we expect that opinion to be respected no matter how little sense it makes or how little expertise was used to form it.

Even when the Gamecocks were putting together three consecutive 11-win seasons, there were plenty of experts weighing in on message boards and call-in shows, offering Yelp-like commentary to let us all know that we didn't run the ball enough, or that we ran the ball too much, or that we couldn't get a pass rush, or that our tackling technique was subpar, or that our recruiting efforts were lackluster.

Does it matter to those folks that our current coach won a Heisman Trophy, played professional football, won six SEC titles and a national championship, and became the winningest coach in South Carolina history? Nah.

All that matters is whether it tastes good.

And 7-6 seasons just don't taste as good as 11-2 seasons do, and not only that, some people just don't like the way that we won during those 11-2 seasons (just like some people, for whatever reason, don't like mustard and aren't going to like any dish that includes it, no matter how well-prepared it is).

If you're like me, you try to drown out all that noise and focus on what's really important. When I visit Yelp, I don't read the reviews. I look at the pictures. Does the food look carefully made? Does it look like something I want to eat? If it does, I'm in.

And with Steve Spurrier as my head coach - a man who never fails to tell it like it is - I look at the intangibles. Does he seem engaged and enthused? Is he generally grumpy after practice, or is he upbeat? Does he have that sly smirk that suggests he knows something about his team that all the rest of us don't? If he does, I'm in.

Right now, he is engaged. He is enthused. And he's smirking up a storm. I'm going to allow myself to believe it means we'll surprise some people in 2015.

Ultimately, it's the chef who really knows how well he's cooked.

I've cooked dinner almost every night since I started trying to cook seriously about 7 or 8 years ago, and I've liked about 5 percent of those meals. That's literally thousands of meals that didn't measure up. That's not me being overly harsh on myself. That's just honesty. After the work is done, you and you alone know if you succeeded.

The audience judges, but the chef is the one who really knows.

On BBQ Pit Wars the other night, barbecue wizard Myron Mixon was lamenting how he'd prepared his brisket. "This (bleep) is overcooked," Mixon said as he put the meat in a box for judging.

Mixon, by the way, has won multiple Grand Championships in barbecue competition, charges $750 for training sessions in barbecue, has written a barbecue cookbook and is generally considered the most decorated barbecue cook in America. And he hated his brisket.

His brisket ended up placing in the Top 5 in the competition and earning him some money.

As he approached the judges' table to collect his winnings, he smiled and yelled to the crowd, "That (bleep) was overcooked!"

He knew.

Whatever you think you know about this football program, and whatever I think I know, Steve Spurrier is the one who really knows.

And it seems like he thinks the 2015 season is going to taste pretty good.