Scott Davis: Island of the Lost

Scott Davis has followed Gamecock sports for more than 30 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. You can reach Scott at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.

I needed a break from football.

Alone and sitting in the dark on Saturday night after South Carolina’s deflating, soul-crushing collapse in Missouri, I found myself staring at my television with a particularly dangerous envy when viewing the ecstatic, ferocious Georgia crowd in Athens for the Bulldogs’ nighttime war with Notre Dame.

So I did what I do best whenever I feel discomfort rising in my chest. I fled the scene.

Eventually I wound up drifting over to Showtime and the comforting rhythms of a little-seen British horror movie called “The Isle.” Since you’ll never see this movie, here’s what I can tell you: Three shipwrecked sailors find themselves washed upon the shore of a nearly deserted island off the coast of Scotland in the 1840s. Something very weird seems to have happened on the island, but no one wants to talk about it. Only four people remain there from what appears to have been a once-thriving village. And every time the sailors try to leave the place by boat, darkness falls, a mist descends, they hear terrifying voices in the night, and they find themselves right back on the island they were trying so desperately to leave.

The movie wasn’t great (in fact, I couldn’t wait for it to be over), but it wound up fitting my mood perfectly.

Shipwrecked. Washed up. Stuck. Alone. Confused. Unable to escape. Tormented by the sound of terrifying voices in the night.

If you’re a South Carolina fan, all of the above apply to you.

We get these moments, these brief flickers, where we feel that ecstasy those wild and rabid Georgia fans were feeling on Saturday night. The problem is that those moments vanish almost as quickly as they arrive.

As such, you can probably count on one hand the number of times you’ve been inside Williams-Brice and witnessed a scene like the one in Athens this weekend.

The Clemson game in ’87. The Alabama game in 2010. The Georgia game in 2012.

They come. And most importantly, they go.

And the rest of the time, we’re all left on the island trying to figure out a way home.

We are, all of us, a tribe of shipwrecked sailors waiting for the storm to lift.

Every half-decade or so, a new savior arrives to bring the sunshine and calm the waves. Say their names with me: Sparky Woods. Brad Scott. Lou Holtz. Will Muschamp.

The one time the savior actually brought salvation with him – Steve Spurrier – the ensuing and unexpected collapse from grace was so swift, stunning and abrupt that just a few short years later, it’s almost like the whole thing never happened.

We’re right back on the island again. And the scary part is that it’s starting to feel like home.

Many of us spent the entire off-season talking about the best-case scenarios for 2019, and how uninspiring they seemed to be.

With the Gamecocks scheduled to play the three most talented teams in football during the 2019 season, it seemed like a whole lot of things needed to go right just for South Carolina to finish a mediocre 7-5 or 6-6. And it’s hard to get fired up for the season ahead when you feel like you’re fighting for an Independence Bowl berth from Day One.

The problem?

We spent so much time fretting about how unpalatable our best-case scenario was that we forgot to contemplate our worst-case scenario. And this season is now firmly trending towards the apocalypse after the Gamecocks lost by 20 ever-loving points to a Missouri team that lost to Wyoming a couple of weeks ago.

I wrote in my weekly newsletter a few days ago about how stunned I was to see USC open as a double-digit underdog to the University of Missouri Tigers. For whatever reason, I – like most Gamecock fans I know – inexplicably seem to believe that South Carolina should always defeat Missouri in football, even though there’s virtually no rational reason for me to feel this way.

As it turns out, the opening 10-point line favoring Missouri wasn’t nearly high enough. One could argue that the Tigers should have won by a much more sizable total than the 20-point victory they notched with breathtaking ease.

I handled the loss with all too typical frustration: There was a lot of sighing, grumbling and pacing, punctuated by my dog glancing up at me with “Are you gonna be OK or should I start thinking about an exit strategy?” looks.

It’s typical because I always handle losses poorly when I think the Gamecocks will – or at least should – win the ballgame. I can sit with admirable stoicism through beatdowns like the one USC took last week against Alabama, but if the boys in garnet and black find themselves on the wrong end of a score against someone like Mississippi State, Arkansas, Missouri or (gasp!) Kentucky, I react like a

spoiled brat who didn’t get the toy he asked for at Christmastime.

The question is, why? Why do I routinely expect South Carolina to defeat opponents like this?

It’s something I’ve been exploring more and more recently with Gamecock friends of mine, this idea that most Gamecock fans – including me – seem to be under a misguided belief that the program is a little sturdier, a little more solid than it actually is.

Gamecock fans are not completely the deluded dreamers our rivals accuse of us being: We know we aren’t an upper-crust SEC program like Alabama or Georgia, and probably never will be.

But many of us still seem to cling to some vague but unwavering notion that we’re right behind them, right there in the league’s upper-middle class with Auburn and LSU.

Reality won’t support that notion. Historically, South Carolina is firmly entrenched in the SEC’s lower-middle-class with the Mississippi schools, Mizzou and Kentucky – far closer to being Vanderbilt than to being Alabama.

Carolina’s league record since joining the SEC is a thoroughly underwhelming 94-124-1 (and yes, those ugly numbers include Steve Spurrier’s glory years). This isn’t a small sample size – this is USC’s 28th season in the league. Inexplicably, idiots like me – and apparently tens of thousands of others – still expect to handle programs like Missouri and Kentucky with no more than a swat of the hand…and we get tangled up with frustration when we don’t.

Maybe that made a whisper of sense during the three-year blip when Spurrier was posting 11-win seasons, but it’s beyond ridiculous to smugly expect a win from South Carolina at any time in 2019. After Appalachian State beat the same North Carolina team that handled the Gamecocks a few weeks ago, and Vandy hung a deeply surprising 38 points on the board in a loss to LSU, even the most optimistic among us must acknowledge that 1-11 is not completely and totally out of the question right now.

For the record, I don’t expect it to happen and I don’t think the Gamecocks will lay down for the remainder of the season, but the fact that we’re sitting here even talking about the possibility tells us just how far the Will Muschamp Project at South Carolina has veered off the tracks in Year Four.

As for me, you have my solemn promise that I will never, ever question a line again. I surrender, Vegas.

Wait a minute, are we really going to go through the motions of handing out Game Balls and Deflated Balls like this is actually a regular column? Does that make any sense? Oh God, let’s get this over with. Fast. A single, solitary Game Ball to…

Bryan Edwards – Six catches, 113 yards and a touchdown. The Gamecocks appear to have no playmaking ability on offense beyond Edwards, who is winning the “Most Courageous” award every time he suits up in a South Carolina uniform from week to week. It feels like he should be playing for a better team. I almost feel like I’ll be relieved for him when he moves on the NFL and leaves this nonsensical circus behind.

The State Newspaper’s Spectacularly Misguided Headline in Its Sunday Sports Section – Many Gamecock fans awoke to find the following headline in the sports section of South Carolina’s paper of record on Sunday morning: “Hilinski Hope Sinks.” Now..

I probably don’t have to tell you that “Hilinski’s Hope” is the name of a suicide awareness and prevention organization founded by Gamecock quarterback Ryan Hilinski’s parents in the wake of their son Tyler’s tragic passing. I don’t have to tell you that because the organization received an overwhelming amount of national media coverage during the South Carolina-Alabama game after Gamecock fans at Williams-Brice Stadium raised their fingers in the number three (Tyler Hilinski’s football number) at the beginning of the third quarter last week to commemorate him and build awareness for the issue. The Hilinskis have been interviewed multiple times about the project, including during some game broadcasts.

After an uproar on Sunday morning, the paper removed the headline from its online editions and issued an apology to the university and the Hilinski family, claiming that the tie-in to the Hilinski Hope foundation was unintentional and appearing to be generally mortified by the entire thing.

I’m going to start with this: I believe them. I believe the headline was an accident. I can’t understand how every human being in that newsroom could have missed the obvious connection to a story that had made the news repeatedly in recent weeks, but still, I’ve worked as a reporter at a daily newspaper. I know that headlines are often slapped together without enough thought. In fact, a group of local officials that I once covered got angry at me because of a headline that accompanied a story I wrote – a headline that I hadn’t written, hadn’t seen and didn’t know would be used. Of all people, I get how mistakes like this happen.

But even if we take the paper at its word, the headline is indefensible for this reason: It’s a mean-spirited and utterly unnecessary trolling of the South Carolina fan base. Its overall effect is, “Oh, you thought the true freshman quarterback was going to save your pathetic little football program? Think again, idiots!” It was a thinly veiled middle finger to all the Gamecock fans who want Hilinski to succeed and who want someone – anyone – to hang their hopes and dreams upon in a disappointing season. There was so, soooo much blame to pass around after Saturday. So…

Why was Hilinski singled out by the paper? Why didn’t the headline read “Muschamp Era Hits a Wall” if there was an overarching need to point the finger of blame at a sole human being? Why, according to this newspaper, is an 18-year-old kid in his third start shouldering the responsibility for the happiness or sadness of fans who follow a program that has been mediocre for 125 years? Why has The State routinely and with malice seemed to gleefully needle and antagonize its thousands of readers who support the University of South Carolina, and why has this baffling approach lasted for decades going back to Herman Helms’ time as the paper’s sports editor?

Can anyone answer these questions?

As for me, sometimes I feel like I’ve run out of ways to describe what it feels like to be a Gamecock fan. But for now, “shipwrecked” will do the trick just fine.

Just a few weeks ago after that North Carolina game left me swirling in a stormy sea of emotion, I compared my passion for the University of South Carolina to a love affair gone wrong. “If your spouse disappointed you as often as South Carolina football does, all of your friends and family would tell you to get divorced,” I wrote in my weekly newsletter following the season opener.

We don’t, though. I don’t know why, but we don’t.

It reminds me of what Hootie and the Blowfish – USC grads and fans all of them, those old poets of a long-gone Five Points – once sang about a doomed love affair, those words you all remember, the words that you can sing, right now, about the lover who leaves you again and again.

If the sun comes up tomorrow, let her be…

We probably should let her be.

But we can’t.