Eddie Lewis says it is nothing crazy. Merely an activity for his downtime. He notes the similarities between it and football.

This is just a hobby, and that is precisely the point.

While popular entertainment for college football players outside the lines includes golf and basketball, South Carolina’s sixth-year wide receiver works on one of his favorite childhood hobbies with a pen and sketchpad.

“Yeah I want to be playing the game all day or whatever,” Lewis told GamecockScoop. “But when I don’t want to be around people or don’t want to be listening to music, I just sit down in the quiet and just sketch for a little bit. I’ll probably sketch for 30 minutes, an hour, whatever it is and that’ll be that. It takes your mind off of stuff.”

It developed naturally. The Harlem, N.Y. native grew up with artists in his family, although he swears he draws better than his mom. His grandfather is a carpenter, his grandmother a poet and his uncle a passionate musician. Three unique disciplines with a connecting line of careful thought and building blocks.

Words, structures, lines.

“Just growing up, I was just seeing that stuff,” Lewis said. “Just being around a whole bunch of creative kind of people, I kind of found my own way and things like that as far as drawing.”

Lewis does not model himself after any professional artist, insisting it is “not that serious.” He has no distinctive style to his work or an end goal. It is solely about the peace in the activity and the satisfaction of taking something out of his head and bringing it to life.

He does have a favorite drawing, though. Page one of his sketchbook, uncompleted by design. No blueprint, no erasing, just adding to and evolving the pre-existing page whenever his hectic football life allows for time.

“It’s a whole bunch of stuff that I like,” Lewis explained. “I’ve got spray can bottles, but it has its own personality to it. He has a face to it, it has the brick background. Just being from New York City and stuff like that, it has cracks in it. It has Bugs Bunny on it [and] some graffiti words.”

One element of football has more creativity attached than any other.

The return game.

Plays break down, freelancing exists and improvisation is inevitable, but every offensive and defensive play call has a plan. Structure is attached. Execution determines if it stays intact. But the return game stands alone. Once you catch the ball, it becomes open waters. Point A is where the punt or kick lands, and point B is a game-changing special teams play. What happens if there is a gap for the returner to fill in.

This is how Lewis views himself. A creative player who thrives on filling in those gaps. He made a name for it at Memphis when he returned 27 punts for 255 yards in 2022 and took one back for a touchdown against North Alabama. He has assumed some punt return duties at South Carolina after Ahmarean Brown’s injury and soaked up reps at wide receiver in the slot.

“All of it is like a form of art,” Lewis said. “You’re going to have different ways and everyone does things differently, you’ve just got to find your comfort zone and how you view the game like that.”

Spotting a crease to cut upfield on a punt return is the same mental processing as closing the loop on drawing a cartoon character. It is a way to channel the positive elements of his biggest passion into a new setting without the stakes of SEC football.

“It takes your mind off of stuff,” Lewis said. “You do something so much that you become accustomed to doing it all the time, and you want some type of change in your life, some type of difference.”

Lewis qualifies as an elder statesman, as much as one can be at this level. He has played in the Big Ten at Rutgers, took a year to go the JUCO route with Butler Community College in Kansas and re-emerged with Memphis in the AAC before stepping up to SEC football for his sixth and final college football season. He is a 25-year-old senior citizen compared to many of his teammates.

Drawing is a hobby, but it signifies a perspective learned from life experience most college football players do not have. Everyone has to slow down, and it has never been more difficult for athletes than right now.

“I know everybody sees them out there on Saturdays in the garnet and black and there’s great responsibility that comes with that,” Shane Beamer said. “But also making sure that me, we, everyone watching them that’s watching them realizes that they’re college students just like everyone else, and they have problems just like everyone else.”

This season is about trying to squeeze every last drop out of his football career. It runs into cliche, but every single game, practice and rep could be his last. It is just the reality of being a sixth-year player. There is a ticking clock on a player who rolled the dice one last time using his free graduate transfer to leap to the highest level of college football.

He is currently only averaging 13.6 snaps per game on offense, with competition for playing time all around. Not only is there pressure on himself to maximize this opportunity, but the heat is swirling around the team right now after a 2-3 start. Everyone handles it differently, and striking a balance between a football-obsessed life and some distraction is vital with every movement under the microscope of social media and a watchful fanbase.

“We’ve got some guys on our team Saturday that probably watched college football all day,” Beamer said about his team’s bye week. “And we’ve got some guys that probably didn’t watch a snap of football and just wanted to get away from it. And both of them are okay.”

Lewis gets away by drawing. He removes himself from the football world just long enough to collect his thoughts and go again, one pen stroke at a time.

“That’s a way of getting away from stuff,” Lewis said. “And that’s why people have hobbies. I just consider it a hobby, honestly. Something that I do from time to time when I’m not doing what I do on a regular basis, and that’s play football.”

A hobby. Nothing more, nothing less.

It’s just the way he drew it up.

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