Scott Davis has followed Gamecock sports for more than 30 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly column that appears on Gamecock Central each Monday during football season.

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I’ve always hated High Noon football games.

Back during my heavy tailgating days, I was a sworn enemy of early kickoffs, so much so that I often threatened to picket outside the SEC headquarters in Birmingham every time I saw the Gamecocks slotted for noon or thereabouts. You need at least three full hours to tailgate properly, and when you find yourself locked into that early tier of timeslots for a home game, it means you’re pulling out the tent and the chairs at the State Fairgrounds just after sunrise.

As much as I enjoy Hardee’s breakfast biscuits, it’s not what I want to eat at my tailgates.

And even though I don’t tailgate like I did in the old days, and even though Saturday’s game was happening up in Knoxville, when I learned South Carolina and Tennessee would be teeing it up at 12 sharp, I frowned. I was going on muscle memory. Something in my body still recoils at the sight of “12 Noon” on a college football schedule.

But by 2 pm or so on Saturday afternoon, I’d changed my mind about these things.

I may become a noontime convert.

Because if you’re going to get rolled up on the road by a division rival whose program has been just as unstable as yours has been for the last five years, and if your offense will be spending the first half sputtering and wheezing, and if your defense is going to be overwhelmed again and again, and if you’re going to be forced to hear the Pride of the Southland Band play “Rocky Top” approximately 62,000 times, and if you’ll be subjected to endless television shots of an orange-clad crowd (many wearing overalls) hollering and cackling maniacally, then you know what?

Better to get it out of the way and get on with the rest of your day.

Can you imagine waiting around all Saturday afternoon and into the evening for that? If I’m going to get punched in the face and kicked in the family jewels on an endless loop, then by all means, let’s go ahead and do that first thing and give me the afternoon and the evening to pick up the pieces and start over.

For first-year coach Shane Beamer and his staff, this was the first outright disaster of the tenure and the first unmitigated bloodbath, and for Carolina fans, it was the first “I’m just not sure I can continue watching this…and the first quarter’s not even over” affair under the new regime. Even that 40-13 pasting by Georgia in Athens didn’t feel anywhere near this grim, didn’t shake you to your foundations and ask you to reconsider your hopes and dreams in life.

South Carolina-Tennessee in the noonday sun in Knoxville did indeed shake the foundations down to the ground. This was one of those games where things got so ugly so quickly that you started expecting to see a crowd of turkey buzzards floating around the South Carolina sideline.

Fumbled snaps on offense. A ravaged Gamecock secondary torched into blackened cinder. A first-and-goal opportunity for South Carolina’s ever-shaky O that ultimately ended with an interception in the end zone on a trick play (which was thrown by a defensive player making a cameo on offense).

As Gamecock fans, we’ve been here before – many times in fact. But for the new guys on the coaching staff…well, there’s nothing quite like your first time, is there? Welcome to the family, boys.

My wife and I had headed back to our hometown of Greenville to visit family members for the weekend, and we piled into the car at lunchtime Saturday with some of my in-laws, planning to watch the game at a nearby restaurant. We arrived to find three of the restaurant’s TVs dialed into the Ole Miss-Arkansas game, a couple locked onto West Virginia-Baylor and a couple showing Texas-Oklahoma. One screen was inexplicably tuned into a replay of the previous evening’s Major League Baseball playoff game between the Houston Astros and Chicago White Sox. We had to ask a server to get a TV switched over to Gamecocks-Vols. How fired up was Greenville, SC, for its home-state university’s football team?

Maybe this should have been a sign.

By the time we staggered away from the restaurant for the five-minute drive back to our in-laws’ house, it was 35-7, Tennessee, and though the Gamecocks admirably kept fighting until the final whistle blew, the football game had essentially been over for hours before the coroner officially declared it dead.

This was the kind of game that reminded you of one of those debauched bachelor party weekends that peak too soon and start getting so out of hand on the morning of the first day that it ends up with most of the participants already passed out before nightfall.

This was the kind of game that led me to frantically Google the first-year records of legendary football coaches in the hopes of finding proof that stuff like this happened to all the greats. Sadly, I’m not joking. If it makes you feel any better, Bear Bryant’s first team at Texas A&M went 1-9, and his first team at Alabama was a mediocre 5-4-1. Steve Spurrier’s first Duke team went 5-6 and lost 42-17 to (of all people) Virginia. Do I get to use these facts to allow myself to feel better about Saturday’s final score? I don’t? You can’t blame me for giving it a shot.

Look, can we learn anything from this one? Sure.

The takeaway is that there’s a long way to go.

And this upcoming game against Vanderbilt is the place to start making progress towards getting to the destination – wherever it may be.

It’s Week Six. And my wife is still the namesake of the weekly Game Balls. I don’t know what to tell you. A Christie or two to the following:

Jaylan Foster, Again – If there’s anyone in a Gamecock uniform making even a semblance of a push to have the Game Balls named after him, it’s Foster. He’s become such a permanent fixture in this space that I’m starting to feel I could just cut and paste the Jaylan Foster paragraph into the column every week. He had 13 tackles and a sack for a Gamecock defense that wants to burn all copies of the tape from this football game.

Fighting On Into the Fourth – I’m not going to lie. After that first quarter, I was expecting South Carolina to lose this game by one of those barbaric 63-3 scores. And don’t get me wrong – 45-20 is not something that leaves you screaming “WE CAN BUILD ON THIS!!!!” Still, I have been mildly pleased by the fighting spirit of these Gamecocks during lopsided contests like this one and the game in Georgia. In both, the men in garnet and black displayed a flickering pulse in the second half despite having every reason to close their eyes and calmly wait for death. It’s not a breakthrough. But it’s better than nothing.

Down By 14 and Having So Little Faith In Your Offense’s Potential for Grinding Out a Touchdown from the Three-Yard Line That You Bring a Defensive Player Onto the Field to Try a Pass…Which is Intercepted – Admit it. Even though there were three quarters left to play, you said to yourself “Ballgame!” when you watched this happen, didn’t you? I did, too.

Tennessee’s “Warp Speed” Offense Reminding Me Repeatedly Just How Unsure I Am About Exactly What South Carolina Wants to Be on Offense – The ESPN 2 announcers kept telling us about how this Tennessee Volunteer team “just wants to fly up and down the football field at warp speed” under first-year head coach Josh Heupel. And for the entire first half, that’s exactly what the Vol O did. Heupel wasted little time establishing an identity for his offensive unit upon his arrival: The Vols would be sprinting down the field on offense each and every possession, come what may. And no, merely having an identity doesn’t necessarily translate to going 12-0 and winning the SEC. Indeed, Tennessee couldn’t solve Florida or Pittsburgh earlier this season despite playing at Mach 3. But at least the Vols know what they want to achieve when their offense takes the field. Does South Carolina? While we’re here…

Two “Unstable” Programs Appearing to Be Headed In Different Directions, At Least for Now – As I wrote in my weekly newsletter before this game, Tennessee’s program has defined instability in the Southeastern Conference over the last decade or so. The Vols ripped through four head coaches after Phil Fulmer stepped aside before they landed on Heupel this past offseason. And yet, Tennessee somehow seems to be farther along in its progress towards rebuilding than South Carolina does with both programs operating under first-year head coaches. If we didn’t know just how far the Gamecock program had fallen by last December, we do now. And that leads me to…

The SEC East Officially Becoming a Slaughterhouse – Watching Georgia absolutely stifle Auburn on the road Saturday afternoon, I came to the ugly realization that this is the best UGA team of my lifetime other than those Herschel Walker/Junkyard Dawg squads in the early ‘80s (and that includes the Georgia team that played in the national title game a few years ago). Since South Carolina joined the league 30 years ago, even when Georgia was potent, the Dogs always seemed accessible to me. If you caught them on the right day, you could beat them. Their program was better than South Carolina’s, but they just didn’t terrify me the way Nick Saban’s Alabama terrified me, or the Florida of Steve Spurrier terrified me. Now? They terrify. Kirby Smart has that program firing on every cylinder. Meanwhile, Florida has stabilized under Dan Mullen, we’re now apparently living in a world where Kentucky is a legitimate SEC East contender deep into Mark Stoops’ tenure as coach, and now you’re telling me Tennessee has revitalized its offense in a handful of games under Heupel? Lord have mercy. I guess what I’m saying is, no matter how stomach-turning games like this can be, let’s not underestimate the task Shane Beamer has for himself as he tries to resurrect a star-crossed program.

Tennessee’s Inconceivably Dreadful All-Black Uniforms – Can we all come together, hold hands and promise to never let this happen again?

For South Carolina, the task now is to somehow forget this game ever happened.

Sometimes on the path to rebuilding, you’ll run into one of those games that’s over by lunchtime.

But let’s at least give the appetizers time to get to the table next time.

Check out my weekly newsletter, arriving on Friday to in-boxes everywhere, and tell me what you took away from a lost Saturday lunch in Knoxville by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.

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