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, Dec. 3, 2021.

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

I’m about to tell you something shocking. Seriously, you’re not going to believe this.

You ready? OK, brace yourself. Here we go.

Almost everything about college football has changed since I was a kid.

I’ll give you a minute to take it in. I know, I know – you’re having trouble wrapping your mind around this. But it’s true. Admittedly, I’ve been hanging around this planet for going on half-a-century at this point. Everything else has changed, too (especially my hairline).

But college football fans are so fixated on history, tradition and the bygone days of yore that sometimes we can forget the sport is evolving into something else almost by the second. We like to believe the game is as timeless as Chuck Norris (who a recent infomercial told me is “80 and Still Ripped!”), but change finds us all at one point or another.

One day you’re watching new movie releases inside a darkened cinema, until suddenly you’re streaming them in your den on Netflix. This is neither a good nor a bad thing. It’s simply what is.

Indeed, I’ll offer an opinion on something that I believe has changed immensely here in our little corner of the world. I suspect you may disagree with it, maybe fiercely. That’s OK – we’re all friends here, and I’m going to throw it out there anyway.

Let’s hold hands and get through this together: It is my very humble opinion that at some point in the last 10 years or so, the South Carolina-Clemson football rivalry stopped meaning as much as it once did to fans on either side of the historic feud. I don’t think it means in 2021 what it did in 1937 and 1955 and 1973 and 1992. There, I said it. I haven’t been struck by lightning yet, so let’s keep going.

Sure, this game still matters.

Sure, if you’re the head coach of the Gamecocks or the Tigers, you’re very aware that you need to win this particular game more than you lose it. Sure, there’s still a bubbling intensity that lingers around the contest, almost as though we’re all going on muscle memory.

But it no longer seems all-encompassing, no longer blots out the sun, no longer seems to have the power to devastate completely or to imbue the entire off-season with happy thoughts, depending on how it turns out. It’s certainly not just another game…but it’s not the Apocalypse, either.

Assuming this is true (and I’m fully aware that you may not believe it is), why did this happen?

Why are we able to move on from this game within days, if not hours?

I have some thoughts.

As a general rule, I try to stay away from message boards, social media and sports radio during football season.

Nothing good can happen there, at least not for me. I get too worked up by ridiculous opinions, the free-flowing anger and snap judgments, the breathtaking certainty so many fans seem to have about anything and everything. For everyone’s sake, it’s always best for me to remain in my cozy sports fan hole and never emerge from the darkness.

But just out of curiosity, I scanned a Gamecock message board or two in the wake of yet another loss to Clemson. I wanted to gauge the mood of the fan base, take the temperature, get a feel for our current outlook.

When I did, I was startled by just how quickly the game seemed to fade from the collective unconscious of South Carolina fans. Many fans had already moved on to recruiting, to catching up on the comings and goings of coaches and players, to following the job openings and the Transfer Portal announcements across the college landscape, to musing about potential bowl destinations for South Carolina.

Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t think this would have been true if I were looking at a Gamecock message board in the wake of, say, South Carolina’s loss to Clemson in 2002. Come to think of it, I spent a frightening amount of time on Gamecock message boards in 2002. And I’m not crazy.

Fans seem so ready to move on to the next news cycle now, to get to what’s next, that I suspect some of you don’t even want me to spend this newsletter’s words on the most recent Clemson game because you’re already committed to the idea that it’s ancient history. You don’t look back, not ever. (If you’ve already repressed it from your memory, South Carolina was annihilated for the seventh straight time by Clemson last weekend, and if you’re a masochist, you can read about my painful Saturday in my column from the game, "Long Day's Journey Into Night".

But it’s not just you. It’s me, too.

If I’m being honest, I’d have to admit that at some point in the last five years, my own response shifted towards that game at the end of the year. Yes, losing to Clemson was still annoying, still spectacularly irritating. I still hated Dabo Swinney with the heat of a thousand suns. But I seemed more capable than I ever had been of flushing these losses and wading into the future. Indeed, the degree and intensity of my frustration to losing Clemson didn’t seem all that different from the frustration I felt when the Gamecocks lost to Tennessee or Kentucky.

Basically, losing sucked, period – whether it was to Clemson or anyone else.

This isn’t something that I could have comprehended as a Boy Gamecock watching games in the 1980s. Back then, losing to Clemson wasn’t merely a dress rehearsal for death itself, it was dying. And yes, everything feels like a life-or-death moment when you’re 13 or 14, and I’m an old man now.

But something’s different, and it’s not just me. For South Carolina fans, the situation has changed both on a micro- and a macro-level.

The sport itself has changed.

And we’ve changed, too.

What changed for college football itself over the last couple of decades? Oh, just everything, that’s all.

For starters, the off-season morphed into a kind of pretend extension of the season itself, almost becoming Football Season, Part Two. Recruiting – gradually growing in importance for years – ultimately became its own sport in the Social Media Era, with websites and analysts and gurus and experts emerging to cover it and talk about it and satisfy the yearning that nerds like me have for every single tidbit and item of gossip.

With television payouts exploding and mega-conferences emerging, the soaring paydays in college football led to more volatility in the coaching markets, too. Coaches are now on NFL-like timelines to produce results, and even winning a national championship may not ensure job stability in this frenzied atmosphere (as the likes of Gene Chizik and Ed Orgeron learned).

Now that we’ve added the Transfer Portal into the mix, there’s so much news for college fans to contend with that it’s getting harder and harder to focus on the games themselves. Especially if your season ended in disappointing fashion, it’s almost obscenely easy for you to instantaneously fill your mind with more interesting or less discouraging storylines when December arrives.

And that Boy Gamecock who was obsessed with the guys in garnet and black during the Age of Hair Metal? He was following a program that competed as an independent in football, playing a hodgepodge of random opponents from year to year (everyone from Miami to Pittsburgh to Virginia Tech to N.C. State to Kansas State), and with no conference championship to play for or familiar rivals to loathe, that Clemson game signified the beginning, middle and end of everything.

Now? Now South Carolina has been competing in the Southeastern Conference for 30 years. Now I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about Georgia and Florida. Meanwhile, Clemson fans have seen their recent fortunes skyrocket to the point that they genuinely feel a season has been wasted when their team doesn’t land in the College Football Playoff. South Carolina isn’t exactly the alpha and omega for them.

When you add it all up, you’re left with a rivalry that still has plenty of significance but is not a Solar System unto itself. It’s a sizable continent, but not the world entire.

Hang on. There’s one more thing. We’d be remiss if we didn’t also state one very obvious, very disheartening fact: South Carolina hasn’t been particularly competitive in this game for nearly a decade now.

And until that changes, I’m going to be just as ready to move on from this game as you are each December. Who’s ready to talk recruiting?

I have been since about 11 p.m. last Saturday night.

Tell me what you think about the state of the rivalry and let me know anything else on your mind by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.