Scott Davis has followed Gamecock sports for more than 30 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective.
He writes a weekly newsletter that's emailed each Friday. To sign up for the newsletter, click here. Following is the newsletter for Friday, Dec. 24, 2021.
Scott also writes a weekly column that appears on Gamecock Central during football season.
It’s the season of peace, love and glad tidings, my fellow Gamecocks.
It’s time to count our blessings, thank the Lord for another year on this earth, and, of course, hope and pray that our friends and family members give us the things we actually want and that are actually on our Christmas lists, rather than random items they stumbled upon at Walmart that “made them think of us.”
In fact, just to head that off at the pass, maybe we should be incredibly and explicitly specific about the things we want this year. As a Gamecock fan, I know exactly what I’d like for ringing in the New Year.
Let’s make a list, shall we?
All I want for Christmas is for South Carolina to actually play in the bowl game that, as of right this second, they’re still supposed to be playing in on December 30. We are going to make it through bowl season, aren’t we? I thought the Gamecocks had wrapped up a successful first-year campaign under head coach Shane Beamer when they clinched a bowl bid with a rousing win over the Auburn Tigers back in November. Then COVID roared back into our lives just weeks later, and now everything seems in flux. I turned on ESPN for three minutes the other day and wasn’t sure if I was watching sports highlights or a Centers for Disease Control alert, with the news crawl on the bottom of the screen showing the grim decimation of team after team in the NBA, NFL and college basketball. Almost unbelievably, Texas A&M’s football team withdrew from the Gator Bowl amidst virus concerns (among other concerns), leaving officials in Jacksonville scrambling to find an opponent for Wake Forest with just days remaining until the contest. I thought I’d seen it all as a sports fan, but vacating a bowl game before you even got there was a first for me. I just hope we’re able to make it to the finish line with South Carolina squaring off against the Tar Heels. I mean, there is no bigger fan of Duke’s mayonnaise than me, not anywhere. This bowl game is personal to me, OK? While we’re here, we may as well talk about this…
All I want for Christmas is to know what the future is for bowl games in general. Worldwide pandemic or no worldwide pandemic, it’s starting to feel like we’ve reached an inflection point for the century-old tradition of college football bowl games. As the College Football Playoff has rounded into shape over the last decade, bowl games had already started to seem increasingly irrelevant. They were always weird, wonky and kind of ridiculous, but that’s what was fun and different about them, and one way or the other, they ended up deciding championships for the sport we love. Now that the Playoff is locked into place, it’s getting harder and harder for many of us to figure out why the likes of Missouri is playing Army in a half-empty stadium in Fort Worth. As someone who enjoys having random college football games on in the background to distract me from family functions I’m forced to attend during the holidays (often with people I’m not entirely familiar with), I like bowls and want them to continue. But other than COVID’s ugly march, the only news I seemed to be getting during the three minutes I glanced at ESPN the other day was the long list of quality players who were skipping their team’s bowl games to focus on the NFL Draft. The Gamecocks have been affected just like everyone else has, with defensive end Kingsley Enagbare moving on towards the draft without stopping first in Charlotte for the Duke’s Mayo Bowl. If we no longer have the best players to fill out the rosters of these things, and we’re no longer entirely sure who these games exist to serve, then how much longer can this thing last?
All I want for Christmas is to know whether I’m completely locked into this men’s basketball season or just sort of casually paying attention to it the same way I sort of pay attention to a show on Netflix while also reading a newspaper or writing this column. If it’s December, then you probably have absolutely no idea where your South Carolina men’s basketball team is headed for the season. I’ve written multiple times about the Gamecocks’ undying fetish for what I’ve termed the Strange Start Syndrome. The SSS is when South Carolina mixes in impressive early wins with losses that are either genuinely ugly or downright odd. Sound familiar? Year after year, the Gamecock men have used the month of December to make it difficult for themselves to impress the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee in March, leaving the rest of us unsure whether we should give our full hearts and souls to the team as it embarks on SEC play. I know, I know…as a fan, I’m supposed to give my heart and soul to the team no matter what. But look, we’re all friends here, right? Can we admit that we only have so much time to go around, and only so much attention to spend, and that attention is increasingly under attack from iPhones and COVID updates and holiday gatherings and bowl games that fewer and fewer people are actually playing in, and that makes it hard to give our hearts and souls to a program that makes it a habit to suck us in with stirring and inspiring wins, only to turn right around and punch us in the face with losses that defy logic? We can. Like many teams, the Gamecocks have been pounded by COVID and injuries early this year, so it’s hard to judge their overall output thus far. Still, there has to be a part of you that’s ready to press the “Here We Go Again” button, right? Already, they’ve posted a 9-3 record and beaten Georgetown and Florida State (GOOD!)…and they’ve lost to Princeton, been absolutely embarrassed by 24 points to Coastal Carolina (yikes) and been soundly spanked by Clemson (BAD!). Then they beat Army by 30 points. I can say with perfect certainty that I have absolutely no idea what they’re going to do the rest of the season. Just like I say about them every December. In fact…
All I want for Christmas is for every sports team that I pull for in the future to perform exactly like the South Carolina women’s basketball team performs. In the immortal words of T-Pain, all they do is win, win, win no matter what. They’ve taken on all comers, scheduling just about every Top 10 program they could get to play them, and no matter which opponent shows up, they end up leaving with a loss. Connecticut fell to them. So did N.C. State. So did Duke. So did Maryland. So did Oregon. The latest victim was second-ranked and defending national champion Stanford, which built an early lead and couldn’t make it stick against the Gamecocks in front of 13,000 fans at Colonial Life on Wednesday. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This program is the program you spend your entire life as a fan hoping to follow. Do not take for granted what Dawn Staley is doing, folks. Don’t do it.
On the other hand, by all means please do go enjoy your holiday. Even if you don’t get everything you put on your Christmas list.
Merry Christmas, Gamecocks.
Let me know what’s on your list by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.
