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, Sept. 17, 2021.

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

There’s a little-known truth about the South Carolina-Georgia rivalry.

Gamecock fans secretly love this game.

For the most part, we dread the Clemson game. We never know what to expect from the Tennessee game. We haven’t been competitive enough for long enough against Florida to feel much of anything about that game. We’d be fine with never playing Kentucky again.

But Georgia? That’s a team we both enjoy hating and enjoy playing.

That’s been my experience, anyway. South Carolina fans – in my conversations and arguments and reflective moments with them across the decades – have an interesting relationship to the Georgia Bulldogs. We loathe them unquestionably. We also sort of (definitely) respect them. We care about them in a different way than we care about anyone else. And it’s all a little confusing.

The Clemson rivalry is easier to understand. Everyone has an enemy in life, and they’re ours. We’re Batman, they’re the Joker, the end. Or we’re the Joker and they’re Batman. Either way, the only role they play for us is to be hated by us.

With Georgia, it’s more like a family member that you’ve always, deep down inside, kind of liked a little more than other relatives, but who absolutely drives you crazy at holiday dinners with obnoxious behavior and ridiculous rants that, though admittedly somewhat clever, are still reprehensible.

To be clear, we do despise them, but let’s admit it: There’s something kind of vaguely enjoyable and correct about their existence. We need them to be there, in a weird way. If we could create a Facebook status for our relationship with Georgia, it would definitely be, “It’s complicated.”

Playing them doesn’t feel like staring into the abyss, not the way the Clemson game feels.

At the same time, the Georgia game absolutely and positively matters in a way that games against Arkansas or Missouri will never matter.

That’s why it was unsettling to glance at the oddsmakers’ predictions earlier this week: The Bulldogs were favored by more than 30 points. Who’s making these lines, the Ghost of Larry Munson?

Can a game still matter to us if we’re 30-point underdogs?

Of course it can. This game will always matter.

South Carolina-Georgia has always been my favorite game on the schedule by the widest of all possible margins.

From 1992-2008, I attended every Gamecocks-Bulldogs game, both in Columbia and in Athens. I’ve been to several of those games since, home and away. I’m not sure what, exactly, has attracted me to this particular contest again and again.

For the most part, none of these games have provided me with an existential crisis – they’ve just been rock-solid Southeastern Conference experiences that were often enjoyable and sometimes distressing and intermittently thrilling to behold (and nothing compares to winning in Athens, something I’ve been fortunate enough to experience on three occasions).

When I was growing up in Greenville, with Athens just over an hour-and-a-half away, Georgia seemed like a local college to us, part of the rotation with South Carolina and Clemson and Furman and College of Charleston. Most of the weirdo nerds I hung out with in high school enjoyed the music of R.E.M. and admired the Athens music scene, and it felt like a place close enough to us that we could take pride in its ascension on the cultural stage.

Indeed, in the spirit of adolescent confusion, I even applied to and was accepted to Georgia during my senior year of high school, and I went as far as to tour the campus and take in a football game Between the Hedges in the fall of 1990. I was in the upper deck at Sanford Stadium for a Bulldog matchup against East Carolina, of all people (then, as now, the Pirates were stalking me to the ends of the earth, and while we’re here, if you missed my column from last week’s East Carolina game, “Adversity Answered,” you can check it out right here).

I recall an angry, even nasty vibe in the stands that day – Dawg fans were suffering through the second season of the Ray Goff Era at the time, and they were a flustered bunch. To a neutral observer, it almost seemed like they were rooting against their own team, so eager were they to get the Ray Goff thing over with. In fairness, who could blame them?

Spoiler alert: I didn’t end up going to Georgia.

But I was back Between the Hedges just three years later, once again in the upper deck, this time as a South Carolina student. You may remember what happened that day, no? (1993 USC-UGA Larry Munson Call)

Since South Carolina joined the SEC nearly 30 years ago, the Bulldogs lead the series 19-10, but it’s been a fiercely and almost stubbornly competitive rivalry over the last few decades. It’s also been a bellwether for the Gamecocks’ fortunes in the league.

When USC is beating Georgia – or at least appearing to be on roughly equal footing with them – the Gamecocks are typically faring respectably against the rest of the conference. Historically, South Carolina can perform well in the SEC and still get blown out by the likes of Florida, but if they’re hanging with and sometimes picking off the Dawgs, it usually means good things are happening (with 2019 being the exception that proves the rule).

In the first year of Shane Beamer’s tenure as South Carolina head coach, while he and his staff are still trying to pick up the pieces and put the program back together, the game on Saturday night in Athens against the nation’s number two team probably can’t be used as a measuring stick. No, we’ll be looking at other games across the schedule this season to get a better feel for where the Gamecocks are at the moment.

But soon enough, in the years to come, this game will once again mean what it has always meant.

It will tell us whether South Carolina is going forwards or backwards or is stuck somewhere in between. Rest assured, there will be a time in the very near future when the Gamecocks will need to make a stand against the Georgia Bulldogs.

And as a band from Athens once sang, “Stand in the place where you live.”

Tell me how you feel about the South Carolina-Georgia rivalry or let me know anything else on your mind by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.

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