Scott Davis has followed Gamecock sports for more than 30 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly column that appears on Gamecock Central each Monday during football season.

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I think I walked 40,000 steps during South Carolina’s thrilling win over East Carolina on Saturday afternoon.

I did them all in my den.

This was one of those “pacing the floorboards” games, one of those games that takes a year or two off the lifespan, and somewhere about midway through the third quarter, I abandoned any and all hope of sitting down for the rest of the contest and just started making fevered laps around my couch. My Fitbit watch buzzed so many times that I can only assume I was setting personal endurance records, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the television screen long enough to check out my accomplishments.

By the time Parker White tapped a 36-yard field goal through the uprights as time expired to give the Gamecocks a gritty 20-17 win in Greenville, NC, I was ready to sleep through the rest of September. I gave up on South Carolina’s chances 16 different times from noon to 3:30 on Saturday, and my gameday texts to friends and family members were getting surlier and surlier by the second, and my laps around the couch had the intensity of a Category 5 hurricane…and then I found myself in the ludicrous position of watching the Gamecocks calmly win the football game.

And to that I say: Hallelujah.

I love finding myself in ludicrous positions. Please keep making me look dumber and dumber with each passing week.

You mean I’ve still got to find a way to stay alive through 10 more of these games in 2021? I’m going to start needing a weekly massage from the nearest luxury spa if I’m going to make it to November.

After watching his team breeze by overmatched Eastern Illinois in Week One, South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer spoke earlier this week about his young squad’s need to handle the adversity of a road contest with always feisty East Carolina. And he was right. We definitely did need to see how this team responded to adversity.

We just didn’t need quite this much adversity.

Can I interest you in some adversity? East Carolina scored a touchdown on the first play of the game with some sort of wonky flea-flicker long bomb thingamajig, the likes of which I haven’t seen since I was drawing up plays in the dirt to my third-grade classmates on the playground. I hadn’t even had time to open a bag of Lay’s potato chips yet, and it was already 7-0.

An Adversity Avalanche followed.

The Gamecocks committed catastrophic penalty after catastrophic penalty – not just a false start here and there, but the kinds of deadly miscues that took points off the board, kept the opposing team’s drives alive, assassinated momentum in cold blood and would have hastened the end of my marriage had my wife not been out of town on a girl’s weekend. The Carolina offensive line appeared to be more interested in finding some quality Eastern NC barbecue after the game than in blocking anyone in purple and gold. The overwhelmed officials seemed absolutely confounded by the review process – by game’s end, even the ESPN 2 announcers had stopped trying to predict what the zebras would decide after they huddled around the replay cameras for what seemed like hours on end.

Fortunately for all of us, East Carolina consistently found itself under the Adversity Gun, as well, and we ended up with the Adversity Bowl, live from Greenville, North Carolina.

This was the kind of game where I took it as a personal victory that I didn’t end up having a policeman knocking on the front door to tell me about neighbor complaints regarding the screaming and cursing coming from the direction of my den.

And when it was all over, South Carolina was somehow 2-0 for the first time in four years, and Shane Beamer was the first newly hired Gamecock coach to start at 2-0 in his first season since Richard Bell did it back in 1982 (NOTE: We may not want to be looking back to the Richard Bell legacy for encouragement, but let’s keep this thing moving).

There are all kinds of ways to take a “glass half full” look at this dreadful game if we wanted to do it – and we do want to do it, and will do it, by God.

Do the 2020 Gamecocks win this football game? Come on, man. Do the 2019 Gamecocks win this football game? I think we can go ahead and drop a “nah” on that one, too.

Even better, South Carolina’s defensive play thus far has been more than encouraging. They made East Carolina’s offense look just as silly as the Gamecock offense looked for much of the contest, compiling a downright astounding five sacks and nine tackles for loss. I’ve been the kind of nervous fan who, in years past, enjoys flipping around to other college football games when the Gamecocks play defense, but I never felt the urge to grab the remote during this one.

And of course, the new-fangled energy and enthusiasm that we all felt watching Beamer and the Boys during the Eastern Illinois game – that always-elusive quality we call “spark” – was back in abundance. Tough environment, plenty of tough breaks to overcome, and still this team is 2-0.

Should we all simply bow our heads, take this W and sprint far away from this game on into the future, come what may?

As long as we never again have to watch a replay of this game, then my answer is an emphatic “Yes.”

Yes, we should.

I named the weekly Game Ball honors after my wife in last week’s column, after she delivered a throwback comedic tour de force during the Eastern Illinois game. And since I don’t think anyone in a garnet and black uniform provided us with a game for the ages on Saturday, she remains Queen of the Hill for now. Let’s toss a few Christies to the following:

JuJu McDowell – True freshman running back JuJu McDowell has battled his way through a stacked Gamecock RB depth chart to emerge as a surprising force through two games. After displaying a notably quick shiftiness in the Eastern Illinois game, McDowell revived a stagnant South Carolina running attack in the second half and arguably carried the team across the finish line to victory. With 11 carries for 71 yards, McDowell looked like the best player on the field in any uniform during the fourth quarter. If all that wasn’t enough, he also reclaimed momentum for South Carolina by returning a kickoff 63 yards deep into Pirate territory, just moments after East Carolina had retaken a three-point lead in the game. The Gamecocks tied the game shortly thereafter. Despite the heavyweights in the USC running back room, it’s going to be mighty hard to put the JuJu Train in the garage after these first two weeks.

Josh Vann – Vann seems to be coming into focus as the go-to guy in a Gamecock wide receiving corps that is still looking for playmakers. Despite fumbling at the one-millimeter line in what would have been an impressive scoring catch (that instead wound up turning the ball back over to the Pirates), he shook off the misfire for a 91-yard day that included plenty of tough catches.

The South Carolina Defensive Line (and the Entire Defense in General) – This East Carolina team isn’t going to put the Fear of God into elite college football squads this season, but there’s no denying that South Carolina absolutely stifled the Pirate offense for the entire game (outside of an occasional eruption or two). The Gamecock defensive line suddenly looks very potent and laden with burly dudes who’ve been in the program for awhile, and that unit is undoubtedly the place for this team to build a foundation in 2021. Meanwhile, linebacker Damani Staley single-handedly turned around a game that was going in the wrong direction by picking off ECU quarterback Holton Ahlers and rumbling the distance to the house late in the second quarter. The pick-six turned a 14-0 game (that might have become a 17-0 or 21-0 game by halftime) into a 14-7 game at the break, and the Gamecocks figured out the rest from there.

Parker White – We might as well start calling him Ol’ Reliable at this point. It feels like he’s been playing in Columbia since 1979, and it’s a shame his eligibility comes to a close at the end of the year.

Whatever Was Happening Throughout the Game With South Carolina’s Offensive Line – Holy Moses. Anybody looking forward to seeing Georgia’s defense next week? It seems like offensive line struggles are endemic at this university – it doesn’t seem to matter who coaches the unit or plays for it. Pick a year over the last three decades, and you can probably describe the South Carolina offensive line as “the struggling South Carolina offensive line.” How do we make it stop?

Penalties, Penalties, Penalties, Part Two – Penalties Galore got a Deflated Ball last week, and they’re back to haunt us again this week. South Carolina almost penalized itself out of a victory Saturday, with disastrous mistakes that kept electrifying a withering East Carolina team and crowd with life. About the only thing the Gamecock defense did wrong on Saturday (apart from giving up a big play or two) was keeping the Pirate offense afloat with head-scratching penalties. I’m glad to see a newfound swagger on that SC defense, but good swagger is like good bourbon – you want some of it but not too much, and there are a couple of players on the Gamecock D who are dangerously close to needing Swagger Rehab right about now.

The ESPN 2 Announcing Crew Running Out of Ways to Describe South Carolina’s Offensive Ineptitude by the Second Half – ESPN’s Kelly Stouffer and Brian Custer needed a library’s worth of thesauruses to find new ways to articulate just how difficult it was for the Gamecock offense to get going in the first three quarters. Again and again, the camera would pan over to South Carolina’s offense approaching the line of scrimmage, and Stouffer would say something like, “Boy, these guys just are not crisp right now” or “man, this group needs a spark” or “when you look at the quarterback position, there’s no other way to say it, the Gamecocks just aren’t getting what they need out there.” After awhile, the announcing duo just started looking on in stunned silence as the unit continued failing to make anything happen.

Scheduling Games on the Road Against East Carolina, or Scheduling East Carolina in General, for Any Reason – How to end this ongoing travesty? I checked future schedules this morning, and yep…South Carolina plays the Pirates again in 2027. I just can’t get rid of these guys.

Me for Firing Off Angry Texts to Friends and Family Throughout the Game – My fanhood’s rusty after a long offseason, folks. We all know our favorite program has needed and continues to need a talent injection after the last few years (especially on offense), and we all know we’re breaking in a brand new coaching staff who is still figuring out what they have to work with, and we all know games against East Carolina have been a trouble spot for decades… and yet I still managed to work my nerves into a tangle of angry frustration Saturday afternoon. Dude, it’s Game Two of a new era. Let this thing play out, bro (and yes, I may have just become the first sports columnist in history to directly address himself in print. Football will be the death of me before it’s all over with).

Heading into Athens next weekend, at least we now know this edition of the South Carolina Gamecocks can withstand a little healthy adversity. Good to know. Can we agree to never test ourselves quite that hard again?

Check out my weekly newsletter, arriving on Friday to in-boxes everywhere. And tell me how you handled the Adversity Bowl and what you think about the Georgia game by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.

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