You're not alone! Like you, Scott Davis is passionate about the Gamecocks and not afraid to admit it. Join him on this wild ride called the 2020 Gamecock Football season by signing up for his new weekly email newsletter.
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.
Let’s set the stage, shall we?
With a Bye Week in the mix, you’ve got two weeks to prepare. Fourteen days – an eternity in the world of sports.
You’ve got all kinds of urgency: You just delivered your worst performance of a weird season, one that officially locked you into a losing record at the halfway point, one that erased any and all momentum, one that provided the ultimate bad taste in the mouth. Your coaching staff seems to be perpetually living atop thin ice. Forget restless – your fan base was “restless” two years ago, and they’re now lighting torches and hoisting pitchforks. Oh, and your opponent? They’ve beaten you every single time they’ve played you since 2014, often by wide margins. The world needs to see that you can compete with them.
In other words, now’s the time.
Now’s the time for bold moves. Now’s the time to pull out every stop, look under every rock and see if there’s a better way forward, try anything and everything, play with desperation, ferocity, insanity and not look back, because you have absolutely nothing to lose. It’s time.
Instead, South Carolina shuffled out under the lights at Williams-Brice Stadium on Saturday night, looked around, shrugged and delivered a performance that was flatter than a pancake.
Flatter than Beaufort County.
Flatter than a sheet of paper, flatter than a bookmark, flatter than a business card.
Speaking of business, this was a business-like meltdown, devoid of passion, spirit, fight or even interest from the home team. When you watch football for a long time, you’ll often hear fans drop back on rote cliches to try to explain the unexplainable. “They just weren’t ready to play,” is what you’ll hear fans say after a particularly lifeless loss, one that leaves them grasping for words to describe the collapse.
Well, this belongs in the “Just Not Ready to Play” Hall of Fame (and it somehow happened after a Bye Week). It deserves its own wing and a unanimous first-ballot selection. The final score – Texas A&M 48, South Carolina 3 – somehow doesn’t seem to do justice to how spectacularly lopsided this result was.
Here’s the question: How can that be possible?
How can you be flat at a time when you need to deliver your most psychotically spirited performance? How can you be flat with two weeks to prepare, with urgency building to a fever pitch, with the program desperately needing a breakthrough against Texas A&M, with the fan base needing something to believe in?
Losing a spirited affair while scratching and clawing to the end would’ve been frustrating. Texas A&M is a better football program than South Carolina, and they’ve made that point emphatically clear for nearly a decade. Few of us expected a win Saturday night.
But losing with disinterest makes fans like me wonder why I bother to stay interested in the first place.
Flat.
If there’s one thing you can count on over the last five years, it’s that South Carolina will be flat at moments of burning, maximum importance. Moments like the Belk Bowl against Virginia, like almost every rivalry game against Clemson during the Muschamp Era, like the cringeworthy “Blackout Game” against Kentucky that was supposed to be some sort of statement of arrival. The list goes on. And on.
When you need to roar, you whimper. When you need to rise, you’re pancake-flat.
Indeed, sometimes it feels like we’re living in a Flat Earth Society around here.
And I’m long past ready to watch this program reach for the sun, moon and stars.
The Purell Hand Sanitizer Game Balls of the Week
Superlatives, shout-outs and salutations go to the following:
Kellen Mond – The Texas A&M quarterback will miss playing the South Carolina Gamecocks. He threw for four touchdowns on Saturday, and ESPN’s announcers told us again and again how much success he’s had against USC during his four years in College Station (and kept flashing Mond’s otherworldly stats against the Gamecocks at the bottom of the screen to the point that I’d memorized them by the third quarter). I’m not exactly sure why Mond gets fired up to play the University of South Carolina, but he’s not a member of the Flat Earth Society when he plays this team. He’s an astronaut.
The Notre Dame Fighting Irish – Hey, I’ve always loved these guys! Always!
National Pancake Day – The Gamecocks’ pancake performance on Saturday has me in the mood to enjoy one of life’s greatest pleasures, and did you know there are actually two National Pancake Days on the calendar? One is Shrove Tuesday, which comes the day before Ash Wednesday on the Christian calendar and is observed with pancake breakfasts, and I absolutely encourage you to learn more here. The other was invented by IHOP as an excuse to sell more pancakes, and let there be no doubt that I have no problem at all with multiple National Pancake Days being on the calendar.
Buttermilk Kitchen – I live in the Atlanta area, and when I need a pancake fix, I head to this Buckhead spot, and I encourage you to do so, too, if you’re passing through (and don’t sleep on the chicken biscuit, either). Of course, I’m from Greenville, and if I’m eating pancakes in my hometown, I’m probably doing it at…
Stax Omega – It’s not just a diner, it’s an institution. If you’re eating pancakes in Greenville, you’ll also want to check out…
Tupelo Honey – The sweet potato pancakes in the Shoo Mercy Griddle are real-deal level.
The Flat Earth Society – There are actually people currently living who do not believe the Earth is round. For Gamecock fans like me, clinging to a program that has managed nearly 130 years of mediocrity or worse, there’s something strangely familiar about these folks, isn’t there?
Deflated Balls
Using the Bye Week to “Work on Some Things” – You hear it every year: Teams are going to use the mini-vacation during a bye to “work on some new things” (as though spring practice, the summer offseason workouts and the August fall camp period isn’t enough time to explore all these fabulous new wrinkles that will presumably change the course of history). Whatever “things” South Carolina chose to work on during that Bye Week were either ignored completely or so ineffective as to be completely unnoticed by the fans watching the game. My guess is that these exciting new twists (if there ever were any) were shelved in favor of doing all the things that got us to 2-3 at the midpoint. You know, things like sticking with a struggling quarterback even as the very ground is sinking beneath your feet, kicking field goals when you’re behind by 700 touchdowns, and other tried-and-true tactics that no wacky Bye Week experimentation could ever dislodge.
The Passing Game – South Carolina’s offense seems to be getting worse by the week, and sometimes by the minute. New nickname idea for the O: The Regressors. Sounds fierce, doesn’t it? Lost in the euphoria of USC’s win over Auburn was an uncomfortable fact – the Gamecocks didn’t play well in the passing game. Collin Hill threw for a meager 144 yards with an interception against the Tigers, but it didn’t matter because the Gamecock defense kept picking off Auburn QB Bo Nix to help them outlast a longtime nemesis. The chickens came home to roost the following week in Baton Rouge, when Hill delivered a 12-for-22, Pick Six performance against LSU in which he was also sacked roughly 400 times. Time to consider a change at the controls with multiple highly recruited quarterbacks on the roster? Coach Will Muschamp emphatically insisted that it wasn’t during the Bye Week, only to watch Hill deliver his worst numbers yet as a Gamecock, with a ghastly 8-for-21, 66-yard, two-interception line against A&M that somehow led to a very slight improvement on his overall Quarterback Rating when compared to the LSU game. Yikes. With the game falling into the abyss, the staff opted to stay the course until deep in the fourth quarter. There are a lot of reasons South Carolina isn’t a very good football team right now, but yes, it’s OK to say out loud that their lack of a passing game is one of them. Of course, that’s not all on the quarterback, because this is…
Dropped Pass U – South Carolina receivers and tight ends (and sometimes running backs) manage to mix in a soul-killing dropped pass or two in every contest during the 2020 season. In this game, the team got that out of the way right out the gates, as a certain touchdown bomb from Hill slipped through the fingers of receiver Jalen Brooks early in the first quarter. Speaking of unfortunate trends…
Field Goal U – Can be found right here in Columbia, SC. This program loves the field goal, finds it riveting. No one has ever appreciated the art of lining up for a three-point try more than this group does. To South Carolina, a field goal attempt is as exhilarating as a flea-flicker, a reverse, a 70-yard bomb. That can be the only explanation I can find for kicking a field goal in the quarter when you’re losing a football game by more than 40 points. Holy moley. After becoming an automatic three-point machine earlier in the season, Gamecock kicker Parker White has struggled to put the football through the uprights in recent weeks, but fortunately for him, he’ll have dozens more opportunities to try to get back on track this season. I look forward to seeing White trotted out for an 82-yard field goal attempt with South Carolina down by 27 points to Georgia with six minutes left in the game.
The 1,000-Yard Club – The Gamecock defense brought some energy to the party early on Saturday night, but by game’s end, there was no hiding the fact that they’d given up more than a combined 1,000 yards of total offense in their last two games against Texas A&M and LSU. That won’t get it done. Yes, the offense is barely alive right now, but it’s not like they’re wasting shutdown performances from their defensive counterparts. This team is crumbling in every phase.
Booooooooooooooooooo – Trust me, I get it. I really get it. But man, it sounds rough rumbling through the speakers on my television set.
As for me, I’m headed to find some pancakes. If I’m going to be forced to spend so much time around flat things in my life, might as well find some that bring me joy.
Let me know your favorite pancake spots and tell me if you think 2020 can get any flatter by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.
