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Scott has followed Gamecock sports for more than 30 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. His columns appear on GamecockCentral.com each Monday during football season and other times throughout the year.

For some reason, my wife and I took a trip down Memory Lane during South Carolina’s loss to Missouri on Saturday night.

With the first half going about as poorly as the last few seasons have gone for USC football, we allowed our attention to drift to a collection of old photos on her iPad. As the game blared on the SEC Network Alternate channel beside us, I glanced at picture after picture of me from 2015 and 2016 and 2017.

Now, I should probably let you know right here that I’ve lost a good bit of weight the last few years, and made some other changes to try to embrace a life that is a little healthier and a little more peaceful and a little more positive. That’s why it was startling to see, in living color, just how hideous I looked a few short years ago.

My puffy, sweaty face glowed red in photo after photo. My poor polo shirts clung to my beefy torso like sausage casings straining to hold in their contents. And my hair? Who knows what the game plan was there – if you’ve ever seen one of those middle-aged balding dudes who are inexplicably trying to hang on to the curly, flowing locks of yesteryear, then you’ll have an idea of what was happening.

Had I really allowed things to get this bad? Apparently so.

I’d always prided myself on staying in shape and remaining fashionably current even as I aged, but when the downward spiral started to grip me, it didn’t take long for the decline to become official fact. Climbing out of the hole ended up being a lot harder than slipping into it in the first place.

Sadly, that’s where the South Carolina football program finds itself right now: In the hole.

It’s a program that at the moment is puffy-faced. Bloated. Wheezing. Sweaty. Faltering.

What was strange about my slow decline is that I didn’t realize just how bad it was while it was happening. Because it happens day by day, year after year, you don’t look in the mirror each morning and think, “Wow, I look even more horrible today than I did yesterday!” You just get a little worse with every passing moment until one day you don’t recognize yourself.

Until eventually there’s a moment of truth.

And only in hindsight, when you look back, can you see just how far you’d fallen.

Many Gamecock fans came face-to-face with that moment of reckoning this week. It was clear, at long last, just how far the program had sunk, how deep the divisions were, and how fragile the culture surrounding the program had become.

After Will Muschamp was fired following nearly five years of mediocrity-to-ignominy, a significant number of former Gamecock players – largely made up of those from the Muschamp Era – trashed the program and its fans on social media. It was a brazen and breathtaking takedown of some of the most supportive, resilient and long-suffering fans in all of sports, arriving like an alarm bell in the night. As long as I live, I’ll never know how we reached this point.

On ESPN’s College GameDay, the familiar lineup of talking heads cackled aloud at South Carolina’s plight, with Kirk Herbstreit (who suddenly seems like an IPTAY board member at this point) all but encouraging every major candidate for the job to pass it by and wait for something better to come along.

Just a few short years ago, the program put the finishing touches on 42 wins in a four-year span under Steve Spurrier, and winning had become enough of a habit by then that the seven wins Spurrier’s team compiled in 2014 felt like a painful, disappointing underachievement. Yet within just a couple of seasons, many of Muschamp’s former players indicated publicly that seven wins represented some sort of “ceiling” for South Carolina football.

Had we really allowed things to get this bad? Apparently so.

My only hope is that five years from now, ten years from now, when we look back at highlights of these last few lost seasons, we won’t even be able to recognize ourselves. We’ll have forgotten how deep the decline had become. It will all seem a little funny, a little sad, a little strange, a little troubling – but mostly just forgotten.

If that’s going to happen, it’s time to start climbing out of the hole. Right now.

And if there’s anybody who wants to stay stuck and miserable in the hole, we need to leave them down there in the dark by themselves.

The Purell Hand Sanitizer Game Balls of the Week

Superlatives, shout-outs and salutations to the following:

Luke Doty – The true freshman quarterback from Myrtle Beach came off the bench – FINALLY – in the second half and promptly delivered a lightning bolt that radiated through the foggy Williams-Brice malaise. Doty’s numbers (14-for-23 and an interception) don’t tell the true story of what he actually delivered Saturday night: Hope. Am I crazy, or did the entire team seem to come alive after Doty trotted onto the field? Even the South Carolina defense seemed more inspired and focused post-Doty, which doesn’t seem to make any sense and probably wasn’t actually true, but it felt that way in the moment. The youngster’s ability to glide through the chaos and turn impending disaster into something positive seemed almost shocking after we all watched the Gamecock offense plod through these last few weeks. Call it hope, call it a breath of fresh air, call it infectious energy, call it whatever you want, but after the experience of the last seven days, Doty’s emergence felt like stumbling upon a rushing stream in the middle of the Sahara. It doesn’t make any sense for me to beat a dead horse and wonder aloud, again, just why Doty has been sitting unused on the bench playing no role whatsoever in a struggling South Carolina offense this season…but why has Doty been sitting unused on the bench playing no role whatsoever in a struggling South Carolina offense this season?

Every South Carolina Player Who Showed Up to Play in the This Game for Their Teammates, Their School and Their Fans – To everyone in garnet and black who suited up Saturday night despite landmines detonating all around them, who didn’t opt out or cut ties, who fought through four quarters despite missing the leadership of the man who brought you to play here, we appreciate you and thank you. And on that note…

Every South Carolina Fan Who Showed Up to Williams-Brice Stadium on Saturday Night to Support Their Team Despite a Worldwide Pandemic, the Implosion of the Program You Love, the Reality That Many of the Players You’ve Supported Through Thick and Thin Really Don’t Care About You and Never Have, and the Ongoing Disappointment of a 130-Year Legacy of Underachievement – Imagine you’re a South Carolina fan. You love your school and your state, and you’ve never given up on it despite decade after decade of disappointment, disillusionment, infighting and all-too-frequent embarrassment. Year after year, defying any and all logic, you and 80,000 others fill your aging stadium at the edge of the Fairgrounds each fall Saturday to support your Gamecocks. There are so many days when you wonder why you’re doing it at all.

You’ve watched your SEC peers win conference and national titles through the years. Your in-state archrival is enjoying an unimaginable decade of success. Would-be saviors and restoration experts have fallen by the wayside time and again. The national media often seems to enjoy needling the program you love, and by extension, you (for being dumb enough to love it).

Still, after all the humiliation, all of the trials, all of the inexplicable bad fortune, you keep doing the one thing no one can ever make you stop doing: You keep showing up.

You persist.

You will not abandon your school.

And as a reward for your unyielding faith, you watched this week as players that you cheered for over the years seemed to gleefully and ecstatically gang up on you. As though you were somehow the problem for 130 years of ineptitude.

Not a fumbling administration. Or a revolving door of coaches. Or players that often seem to wilt under the pressure of reviving a program that so many people care about.

Somehow it’s the fans who are at fault for this program’s endless mediocrity? It’s like blaming people who are dying instead of pointing the finger at the disease itself.

Let’s be very clear about one thing regarding South Carolina football: The everlasting fan support is just about the only thing that is remarkable about the last 130 years of this program. Don’t forget it.

That’s why I’m handing out….

Deflated Balls

To Every Former Player Who Inexplicably Chose to Trash Their School in Public Forums This Week – I get that you’re loyal to the coach who gave you a chance to play major college football. I get that you’re sorry to see him go. And God knows that I’m aware fans are fickle, emotional, stupid, dramatic and ridiculous, often all at once and often in ways you can’t ignore. But none of this – not SEC football, not the NFL, not Premier League soccer, none of it – matters without them. Fans give all of these games meaning, and without them this is all just YMCA flag football. Fans are the engine that drives the interest that allows for multimillion-dollar paydays and endorsement contracts.

And fans who support their teams no matter what – like the ones who follow the University of South Carolina’s ups and many downs – are hard to come by. They deserve respect and appreciation. They don’t deserve what they received this week.

See, these fans always keep climbing up towards the light no matter how deep the hole they find themselves in.

They always keep climbing up towards the light.

And to those who don’t want to climb, they’re welcome to have the bottom to themselves.

The rest of us will persist.

Let me know how you’re feeling by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.