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, Oct. 8, 2021.

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

My wife is James Bond’s biggest fan.

Well, perhaps we should clarify that she is James Bond’s biggest fan when he is being portrayed by Daniel Craig. Remember when Craig emerged dripping wet out of the ocean in “Casino Royale,” wearing a swimsuit so tight it could suffocate a small child? That moment is among the five most important events in her adult lifetime.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that we’d planned to be inside a movie theater on opening day last spring for Craig’s final performance as 007 in the movie “No Time to Die.” Then COVID-19 rumbled in, and the premiere was pushed back indefinitely.

You know the rest. The movie ended up being delayed an astonishing three more times and wound up finally hitting screens last weekend, a year-and-a-half late.

We’re still excited to see it, and we will still see it, and whenever we get around to doing it, I’m sure we’ll enjoy it.

But a year-and-a-half delay has a way of taking the wind out of the sails, doesn’t it? After 18 months of waiting and wondering if the movie would ever be released, we no longer felt we needed to camp out in our local theater’s parking lot when it finally arrived last Friday. It’s an unfortunately anticlimactic way to conclude a rousingly enjoyable franchise.

That feeling – wind vanishing, sails slumping – is a good way to describe what South Carolina fans are experiencing at the halfway point of the 2021 season, the first under new head coach Shane Beamer.

It comes after a frenzied, ecstatic offseason starring a personality-plus Beamer, who seduced the Gamecock faithful with his ability to inspire and to articulate a vision for the future. There were some early successes on the recruiting trail, some heads turning in the national media. Things seemed to be rolling forward towards something resembling progress for a program in decline.

Then, as we knew it eventually must, the 2021 season rumbled in.

And after six games, Gamecock fans find themselves in the sadly familiar position of waiting and wondering, and the rewards of a lifetime of passionate fanhood have been delayed and pushed back, and delayed and pushed back again, and now a few fans have even started to ask the question.

Is there still a release date for this premiere?

We won’t know the answer to that for awhile longer. What we do know is that the Vanderbilt Commodores will arrive at Williams-Brice Stadium on Saturday afternoon for a Homecoming matchup that suddenly throbs with importance.

For South Carolina, pushing back the start date is no longer an option – it’s time to show signs of life right here and right now. Now more than ever, it’s no time to die.

South Carolina-Vanderbilt debuts at an unfortunate moment for the Gamecock program.

The gang in garnet and black find themselves in a gruesome death-match with Vanderbilt to avoid the Southeastern Conference basement (with Missouri hovering nearby, contemplating throwing a hat into the ring for the SEC Cellar Dweller Championship).

Other than a stumbling Mizzou, everyone else in the SEC East appears comfortably beyond South Carolina and Vanderbilt in the various stages of league contention. Meanwhile, no single program in the SEC West seems to be struggling with quite the consistency or the unflagging commitment that SC and Vandy have shown thus far in 2021 and across the last few seasons. Whether we like or not, that is what’s at stake on a Homecoming Saturday: The Basement Bowl.

The Gamecocks have won 12 in a row against the ‘Dores, and this is a game you’d love to take for granted and mark for victory. But that can’t happen after a 45-20 walloping by a Tennessee team that was supposed to be somewhere in the vicinity of the same type of rebuilding project South Carolina is currently enduring.

This team can take no one for granted, not now.

What’s needed, first and foremost, is something that can spark confidence, belief and faith on the Gamecock sidelines. Almost every time I’ve watched a South Carolina game with friends and family this season, someone has at some point uttered a sentence like, “These guys just don’t have any confidence right now.”

What could change that?

It might be a rejuvenated rushing attack. It might be robust play from the quarterback position. At this point, it might even be one long, sustained drive on offense that ends in a touchdown. But it needs to be something, and it needs to happen soon.

Like Saturday afternoon.

If you missed my column from the debacle in Knoxville, then by all means, please do reminisce upon that noontime fiasco right here.

Esquire magazine just released a power ranking of all the actors who have played James Bond, and let’s just say this list was controversial. Tough day for my man Remington Steele.

If you need yet another ranking of James Bond actors from worst to best – and let’s face it, who doesn’t? – then our friends at Den of Geek have you covered.

Everyone knows how I feel about creating Mount Rushmores, and at some point down the road we may need to tackle the Bond Villain Mount Rushmore. There are roughly 12,000 candidates across six decades of movies, but my early pick for the George Washington slot would almost certainly have to be the immortal Blofeld.

I enjoyed this YouTube clip, admirably entitled “Daniel Craig Being the Best James Bond for Six Minutes Straight.”

One of the memorable scenes from the above clip comes from “Casino Royale,” when Bond almost dies after consuming a poison drink, only to jolt himself back to life with a defibrillator.

As it turns out, that’s exactly what our program and its fans need right now: An electric shock to the heart, something to get the blood flowing again.

Let’s hope the defibrillator arrives in time on Saturday.

Tell me how you’ve been handling another pushed-back premiere for the South Carolina program by writing to me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.

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