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, Jan. 28, 2022.

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

Lean in, I’ve got a secret to tell you.

You ready for this? What you’re about to hear goes against all the received wisdom, the basic understanding of life as we know it, the popular conception of “the truth.”

There’s no turning back now, so here we go: South Carolina fans care about basketball.

In the words of Chris Rock, “Yeah, I said it.”

I know you’ve been conditioned to believe that South Carolina fans don’t care about basketball. I know the general consensus is that South Carolina fans care about football first, second and third, then spring football, then football recruiting, then baseball, then…whatever.

There have been more than a few South Carolina basketball coaches across the ages who have reinforced that notion by suggesting that Gamecock fans just weren’t rabid enough to create the type of environment they needed to thrive. Dave Odom groused about the team’s supporters in an infamous rant after an Ole Miss home game, suggesting there was more to being a fan than “drinking beer in the suites.” His successor, Darrin Horn, mused after being fired that he hoped to wind up at a place where he had a chance to win.

You’ve heard it all before: We’re an apathetic, mild-mannered bunch when it comes to basketball, wishing the guys well but not living and dying with them.

And yet almost every time I write about the South Carolina basketball program, I get passionate responses from fans who believe it can be better, who want it to be better and who know it can be better (because they were alive to see it).

I’m certainly not a statistician and the amount of reader mail in my inbox shouldn’t be mistaken for a full-fledged scientific study, but I can tell you without any doubt that when I hear from Gamecock supporters on the topic of basketball, it sure as heck seems like they care.

And they care a lot.

A couple of years ago, I touched on the stubbornly resilient legacy of Frank McGuire’s ‘60s and ‘70s Gamecock basketball teams in a column called “The Search for "You Had to Be There" Moments.” The responses I received were arguably the most impassioned and fervent of any feedback I’ve gotten in all the years I’ve been writing – the folks who had been inside Carolina Coliseum to watch those teams had experienced something akin to a religious awakening.

Every era provides us with a memorable South Carolina sports team that ends up becoming synonymous with a time and place. For fans of my age, it’s the 1984 “Black Magic” football team. If you’re a generation younger than me, it’s Ray Tanner’s baseball champions. If you were born in the early 2000s and are just now maturing into college age, the Steve Spurrier teams of Connor Shaw and Jadeveon Clowney and D.J. Swearinger will be the ones you cherish through the decades.

We all have a touchstone, a singular team that ended up defining for us what it meant to wear garnet and black.

And yet of all those teams across all of the years, it is those McGuire basketball teams, those teams that played more than half a century ago, that seem – still – to matter the most to more Gamecock fans than any other.

Mattering more than Steve Spurrier’s 11-win teams, more than Tanner’s baseball champions, more than my beloved “Black Magic” boys, more than anybody, is a brief run of basketball excellence that encompassed just a single ACC title, a handful of NCAA Tournament visits and no Final Four appearances.

I was not even alive when they played, and yet I am fully confident that those teams have been and remain the most beloved South Carolina sports teams of all time.

Now…are we really sure Gamecock fans don’t care about basketball?

In last week’s newsletter, I contemplated the current listless state of South Carolina men’s basketball and tried to figure out where the program was headed (if anywhere). Almost inevitably, the team has won two consecutive games (South Carolina sinks Vanderbilt) since that piece hit your inbox last week. I only wish I could bring more Gamecock teams luck by writing about their inconsistencies.

I’ve typically found that when a column generates a wave of feedback, the responses are all over the map. In fact, it’s often hard to pinpoint a unifying set of values amongst the South Carolina fan base. Not this time. The responses I received over the last few days were plentiful, vehement and uniformly centered on one thing: Gamecock fans are ready for this program to take a step forward.

I didn’t receive a single note from anyone who suggested the team was on solid ground or on the cusp of a breakthrough. But I also didn’t receive any comments from fans who declared they no longer cared about the basketball team, weren’t invested in it and were merely biding their time until spring football practice arrived.

The message? We care. We just need a spark, something to light the fire again, something to ignite a program that we simply wish reflected the same passion and enthusiasm that we feel in our hearts.

Readers offered a variety of theories on why the program has settled into a malaise – a lack of commitment to recruiting, the on-court demeanor of coach Frank Martin and an overall vibe that South Carolina fans just shouldn’t expect much more from the team than what they’ve received (even though this simply isn’t true).

A reader named Will offered a response that sums up the general mood of the fans who wrote me, writing “In 1974 when I graduated from high school, there were a lot of Carolina men’s basketball fans due to Frank McGuire‘s ownership of the ACC and our fans loved to fill the seats. Basketball games were fun. One of the reasons I was a student senator was the opportunity for great seats at the games. Even Clemson fans liked Carolina basketball because they had no hopes of seeing their teams win ACC games.”

There was a time when basketball was the sport that mattered most at the University of South Carolina.

Yes, it’s been a while. Yes, our fans have grown accustomed to basketball mediocrity.

But we’re not really suggesting South Carolina fans are the reason why this program can’t take the next step, are we?

And it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t always this way.

We have cared deeply about this game and this program before. We could do so again.

We want to be invested, we want to live and die with this team, we want to rally behind them.

I promise you. We do.

Tell me if you believe better days await South Carolina basketball by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.