Scott Davis: CTRL + ALT + DELETE?

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, Oct. 1, 2021.

Scott also writes a weekly column that appears on Gamecock Central during football season.

My laptop has a bug problem.

Unfortunately, it’s not the kind that can be fixed with a visit from Arrow Exterminator. Otherwise, I’d have already called them.

No, these bugs are the kind that live inside my computer, making it sluggish and clunky and frustrating. Sometimes my computer forgets that it’s actually a computer. Sometimes it makes me watch an hourglass or a wheel spin around and around for hours, even days. Sometimes it turns off a video clip just as the person talking is finally getting around to saying something interesting.

Almost all the time, it leaves me angry and unfulfilled and on the verge of weeping.

This is also the way I feel when I watch South Carolina’s offense at the moment.

It’s the way I felt watching South Carolina’s offense in 2020, as well…and in 2019, and shoot, while we’re here, 2018. If you’d like to describe my laptop and South Carolina’s offense at the same time, you could make that happen. Sluggish, clunky and frustrating will cover it for both. (If you missed my column from the Kentucky game, “The Identity Project,” you can get lost in the mystery of what’s ailing the O right here.

As a fan, there’s not much I can do about the Gamecocks’ offensive woes other than cry alone each night while I lie in bed, or pray, or stare longingly out a window into my backyard while dreaming of better days.

But when my computer acts up, I try to take matters into my own hands, and I do this even though I know less about technology than someone who was born when Christopher Columbus was alive.

If I see a spinning hourglass, or a YouTube video locks up on me, or my cursor starts floating around the screen like it’s high on ecstasy, I press three simple buttons and start over.

CTRL. ALT. DELETE.

When things aren’t working, I wipe the slate. Try again. Cut…Take 2.

I have the patience of a hummingbird.

Flitting through my days in a frenzy, I rarely stop to investigate why problems befall me. I just try to obliterate anything that causes a feeling of discomfort in my chest.

If it seems like my car isn’t accelerating when I press the gas pedal, I press it harder. If the computer wheezes and whirs, I don’t get it fixed – I just keep screaming towards the heavens and pressing the reset button again and again (which almost certainly makes things worse).

Remember that scene in “Goodfellas” when Henry Hill explains how the mob handled things when one of their restaurant investments started to falter? “When you can’t borrow another buck from the bank or buy another case of booze, you bust the joint out,” he says. “You light a match.”

That’s my solution to every quandary I face in life: I light a match.

Fortunately for all of us, I’m not coaching the South Carolina offense in the wake of a listless beginning to the 2021 season. Because I’d probably press CRTL + ALT + DELETE. I might even be tempted to reboot after every offensive series. And it would almost certainly make things worse.

Gamecock offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield is instead staying the course, at least for now. “You try to stick to the plan as much as you can and understand eventually you’re going to break through and make a play and it’s going to execute it like you thought it’d work in practice that week,” Satterfield said this week. “It takes a lot of trust and there are times you do have to trust your gut, trust your instinct and make your adjustments at halftime.” (Read more of his comments here.)

Coaches don’t get the luxury of pressing the reset button every time they take the field. To keep the chaos at bay, they must have the patience of elephants.

Even when the rest of us feel like hummingbirds.

Of course, perseverance can have its own drawbacks. There’s always the danger that you wind up sticking with a plan that has no hope of ever succeeding. There’s always the danger you’re confidently steering the Titanic into an iceberg.

We’ve seen this approach sink stubborn Gamecock coaches of yore, coaches who just weren’t going to alter or tweak or even massage their philosophies no matter how dire the situation became. I don’t have to name those coaches for you – you’re already calling their faces up in your mind even as you read this.

Yes, you can see them now. You can see them being hardheaded about pushing forward with a nonexistent running game, grinding up the middle against a wall of defenders who stood ready to swallow anyone in garnet and black. You can see them trying to force-feed a drop-back passing scheme despite a suspect offensive line and an average-armed quarterback.

You can see them now. And you’ll see them forever in your nightmares.

After four games of offensive struggling – which is what we have now – patience is a virtue.

But after four years of it, patience is a crime.

There’s a fine line between optimistic persistence and hardened inflexibility.

For now, we must trust that head coach Shane Beamer is on the right side of that fine line, and that he’ll know when to stay the course and when to shake up the Magic 8 Ball.

As for me, I’ll be watching the Gamecock offense take on Troy this Saturday and hoping to see improvement.

And if I don’t…well, you know me. I’ll just turn the TV off, then immediately turn it back on and hope the result is different.

Tell me how you’re handling the Gamecocks’ early offensive struggles and what you hope to see in the Troy game by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.

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