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, Aug. 20, 2021.

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

Fans have a luxury that coaches and players will never have.

We get to feel bad.

We can pout, whimper, cry on each other’s shoulders, listen to sad indie rock on our iPhones while staring blankly at the setting sun (something I may or may not have done this week). We can take a minute for ourselves, for our emotions, our feelings. We can mourn the disappearance of our hope.

So when the news descended last weekend – as though carried down from the sky by a flock of pitch-black crows – that South Carolina QB1 Luke Doty had been injured during a scrimmage and might (MIGHT!) miss the opening game against Eastern Illinois, Gamecock fans mourned. We cried out into the night. We Facebooked our depression.

Was the season dead before it began? Had all of this – spring ball, the late-summer talking circuit of media days and booster dinners, the spirited start to August practice – been for nothing?

Doty, of course, was the one quarterback on the roster who looked and felt like an SEC starter to us. There was potential behind him, but potential in the form of youngsters, transfers and even graduate assistants. Most of us already felt like we had just started getting to know this team. Now we needed to reintroduce ourselves…again.

Kevin Harris was ailing. So was Cam Smith. Karon Prunty had headed for the Transfer Portal. And now Doty faced an uncertain few weeks? Come on, man.

After this onslaught, I went ahead and classified my emotional well-being as “questionable” for the September 4 opener against Eastern Illinois (and slotting it down to “doubtful” was a possibility). Many of you joined me.

Fortunately for the rest of us, head coach Shane Beamer did not join us in the Circle of Grief.

“I know there was a lot of doom and gloom,” Beamer said in announcing Doty’s prognosis. “I saw and heard a lot about the hopes of our season hinged on the results of an MRI and frankly that's bullcrap.”

OK, I’m intrigued. Tell me more.

I’ll admit it.

There was a large part of me that thought, “What else could we have expected but gloom and doom?”

We all know the history. It’s ingrained into our cellular structure. The program has never won the Southeastern Conference in 30 years of competition. Its best, brief stretch of football glory came nearly a decade ago. Weird and ungodly things seem to drop onto this team like anvils falling from a storm cloud.

Forget about all those lost decades of ugliness for a moment and merely call to mind what has transpired for South Carolina football in just the last 10 years (Marcus Lattimore’s multiple season-ending injuries, Steve Spurrier’s midseason retirement, Jake Bentley’s bizarre season-ending injury after Game One of the 2019 campaign, Will Muschamp’s everything, the Team Up the Road doing whatever they’ve been doing), and the picture starts clarifying.

Doom and gloom? Yes. Indeed. Of course.

So if there’s any fan out there who took a moment this week and thought, “Really? Us? Again????,” I am officially absolving you from feeling any guilt about it. God knows you’ve earned the right to your sorrow, as I have.

But I’m also glad our head coach has little patience for our grief. I’m glad he declared war on our grief. I’m glad he called it out, poked fun at it, named it and ridiculed it. I’m glad he is encouraging us to divorce our grief, now and forever.

Because grief does not win SEC titles.

If it did, we’d have a full trophy case by now.

When I think about Gamecock football coaches through the years of my life, I’m struck by how many of them seemed to become swallowed alive by the job.

You could see it on their faces, hear it in their voices, watch the way they slumped on the sidelines. They had been consumed, drained. Think of Sparky Woods or Brad Scott or Will Muschamp, staring out towards midfield as though calmly waiting to be annihilated by a cruise missile blast.

Beamer has yet to coach his first game at South Carolina, and of course, there’s time yet for him to watch the worst unfold, time yet for the job to impose itself, to test every ounce of his optimism and belief, to rattle him to the core.

But he’s not waiting for grief and sadness to swallow his program – he’s preemptively declaring war on it.

Good.

Because war is what we need against an enemy this infernal, war against the everlasting acceptance that the way things have been must be the way things are.

In truth, there is a mood and vibe and feeling that has enveloped this program for as long as I’ve been following it, and it has been the South Carolina faithful who have pushed back on this feeling the most through the years, despite our many moments of doubt.

We push against it by waiting, again and again, for our doom to lift, and by believing that someday it will.

Coach Beamer, with this refreshing opening salvo (Stop 'doom and gloom'), has seen the enemy and named it and called it to the battlefield.

The enemy, for this program, is and has always been doom and gloom.

And the only way to lift our doom is to push it off by force.

Tell me how you’re shaking off the gloom and how you feel about the 2021 season by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.

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