Scott Davis: Reality Bites

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.

In addition, Scott writes a weekly newsletter that's emailed each Friday year-round. To sign up for the newsletter, click here.

Of course we all knew it was coming.

We knew it all the way back in December, in the giddy wake of new head coach Shane Beamer’s first upbeat and uplifting press conference as the leader of our program. We knew it, deep down, even in the afterglow of his first successes on the recruiting trail, even as an intriguing set of spring practices wound down, even as we watched the coach drill a walk-off homer in his first appearance at SEC Media Days.

Even in the anticipation of August, we knew. And we continued knowing even after the Gamecocks finally, at long last, took the field under a new regime and blew the doors off Eastern Illinois, then survived a strange, grueling game in Greenville, NC against long-time nemesis East Carolina.

Yes, we knew, eventually, that the excitement and the hope and the faith would be tested.

We knew the reality of the situation, knew where the program really was after five years of a downward spiral. We knew that there will always be bumps in the road along the way to rebuilding this thing. We knew there would be a Saturday – many Saturdays, in fact – where everything that could go wrong did so.

Even the almighty Nick Saban lost six games in his first year at Alabama. Kirby Smart took five L’s in his inaugural season as the head coach at Georgia. Resurrecting a college football team is not a “set it and forget it” job, not by a long shot.

We knew all of this.

And yet, until we actually saw it happen, until we saw the Gamecocks take the field and get outclassed and occasionally overwhelmed and emphatically and thoroughly defeated, well…it was blissful to let the fantasy linger a little longer.

After all, didn’t we deserve to let it linger? Think of all the program and its fans had endured during the last half-decade or so. Didn’t we deserve this? Didn’t we deserve a happy ending that never actually ended?

We did, but it ended anyway.

It ended, as of course we always knew it eventually would, in Athens on Saturday night against the nation’s No. 2 team. Just minutes after kickoff, reality descended with brutal and swift efficiency, and it vibrated throughout the night until the final seconds ticked off the clock. Wave after wave of five-star Georgia Bulldog athletes chased the overmatched Gamecocks up, down and around Sanford Stadium for four quarters, and South Carolina did little to help itself in the frenzied atmosphere.

All those false start penalties, all those quarterback hurries, all of those zero-yard rushes?

Reality.

All of those screaming Dawg fans, all of those ESPN camera shots of Cooper Manning wearing a Georgia cap in the stands and high-fiving everyone in his section, all of those scenes of a grim South Carolina sideline, of Hairy the Dawg strutting and preening, of little UGA puffing and panting in his air-conditioned doghouse, of Kirby Smart gesticulating and screaming and smirking, of Will Muschamp enrobed in a Georgia polo and wearing a headset and staring blankly at midfield just as we remembered him?

Reality, reality, reality.

In college football, as in life, reality almost always wins.

As for the happy ending that would never end? It sure was fun while it lasted.

Way back in Week One following the Eastern Illinois game, I named the weekly Game Balls after my wife, whose fanhood had seemed rejuvenated by the dawn of the Shane Beamer Era. We keep waiting for a Gamecock player to seize the mantle and announce himself as the new honored namesake of the Balls by delivering a series of dominant performances, but after three weeks, we don’t have any takers. This is still Christie’s house. A round of Christies to the following, please:

Jaylan Foster – It’s always uplifting to see a player like Foster – a senior safety who has been in the program for a long time and who has been a reserve for much of his career – put together a night that he’ll always remember. He compiled a pair of interceptions along with seven tackles to deliver one of the few memorable evenings for anyone in a Gamecock uniform.

Battling – With an emphatic loss already a foregone conclusion by the third quarter, I’ll admit that part of me expected to see the Gamecocks wilt completely and slink back to the locker room as an utterly defeated bunch. It didn’t happen. Instead, South Carolina kept scrapping along despite having little to play for but pride, and I found myself somehow walking away with a vague feeling of hope after watching my team lose 40-13. Even though it happened late and against Georgia’s backups, South Carolina’s mild offensive success in the fourth quarter and its brief establishment of a running game gave me and many other fans a flicker of life as we head into this weekend’s Kentucky matchup.

Did you know that the Eagles’ “Their Greatest Hits, 1971–1975” is the best-selling album of all time in the United States? If not, now you do. After three weeks, I’ve found that I keep handing out Deflated Balls to the same things again and again – these identical miscues and follies are becoming a “Greatest Hits” album of sorts for this South Carolina team, but unlike the Eagles record, it’s not the kind you enjoy listening to over and over. Let’s, sadly and regrettably, toss out of a few Eagles to the following Greatest Hits:

Penalty Purgatory, Part Three – You’re on the road in Athens, Georgia, facing the nation’s No. 2 team, a team stocked with elite athletes playing in front of a bloodthirsty home crowd at night. It’s an absolute cauldron of bubbling tension. You’re a 30-point underdog. You’ve been committing silly penalties over and over through the first couple of weeks of the season, so much so that your coaching staff has publicly lamented the mistakes and vowed to fix them. You’ll need to play a perfect football game just to hang around in this atmosphere. And…you instead commit an astounding 10 penalties for 80 yards, many of them astonishingly sloppy, preventable, and even downright ugly. A week after Gamecock defensive back Cam Smith helped to inject East Carolina’s offense with new life by picking up an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, South Carolina receiver Josh Vann (who is by far the team’s greatest weapon at receiver) negated his own impressive reception by getting flagged for taunting. The Gamecock offensive line, suffering through a dreadful evening against what is arguably the nation’s most talented defense, made its cause all the more difficult with a flurry of false starts and holding penalties. And speaking of the offensive line…

“The Struggling South Carolina Offensive Line” – In last week’s column, I joked that you could pick out just about any South Carolina offensive line over the last 30 years and describe it as “the struggling South Carolina offensive line.” It seems like the trenches have been an area of concern for decades at this university. But after three weeks, I think we can finally take the quotation marks off and officially deem this, in all-caps, The Struggling South Carolina Offensive Line. And listen, Georgia’s defensive front will make every offense they play this year look silly. The Bulldogs are spectacularly talented, and there’s no shame in getting pushed around by those guys. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just that South Carolina was facing a talent mismatch. The Gamecocks’ offensive front also just didn’t seem to be at all in sync. The ESPN announcing crew of Todd Blackledge and Sean McDonough repeatedly expressed their mystification at South Carolina’s linemen simply not appearing to know who they were supposed to be blocking, or if they should be blocking anyone at all. Blackledge kept pulling up replays ad nauseam to show members of the Gamecock O-line pulling up after the snap and blocking air, even in routine situations where Georgia wasn’t blitzing or throwing a wave of defenders into the fray. The unit’s penchant for penalties didn’t help, either. In fact, it’s hard to even know how to judge the performances of the rest of South Carolina’s skill players on offense. When every offensive snap quickly devolves into a free-for-all because of pressure, it doesn’t really matter what plays are being called or who’s on the field to enact them. I’m not sure there are answers right now.

My Occasional Flirtation With Georgia Patriotism Over the Last Few Years – Faithful readers of the column are aware that my wife and I are Greenville natives who moved to the Atlanta area more than seven years ago. For years, whenever someone asked where we were from, I always just answered, “South Carolina, currently living in Atlanta.” After we moved out to the Atlanta suburbs and settled in Roswell, I became enmeshed in a love affair of sorts with the town. I bought a couple of Roswell High t-shirts despite having not attended Roswell High. I started joking that I was “President of the Roswell Chamber of Commerce” because I’d become such a cheerleader for the area. I even occasionally – gasp – started saying “Um, Roswell???” when asked where I was from. A couple of weeks ago, during a family vacation to the North Georgia mountains, I found myself atop an observation deck on the peak of Brasstown Bald, the highest point in the Peach State. Looking across the rolling Georgia hills, tinged blue and standing all the way to the horizon, forever, I felt my heart stirring and thought to myself, “Wait, do I care about this state? Do I…love this state?” On Saturday night, watching all those roaring Dawgs fans Between the Hedges, those rows of shirtless frat dudes, screaming gals with faces painted red, the seemingly endless parade of psychotic guys wearing Road Warrior shoulder pads with spikes on them, I think I was finally able to answer that question. Greenville, South Carolina, on my knees I beg your forgiveness.

After a jubilant offseason, reality has returned.

And the reality is that South Carolina’s next opponent – those formerly flimsy, suddenly pesky and frisky and profoundly annoying Kentucky Wildcats – has been a prickly thorn in the side of our team over the last half-decade. This Saturday night at Williams-Brice is our next chance to take a stand against reality.

Time to bite back.

Check out my weekly newsletter, arriving on Friday to in-boxes everywhere. And tell me how you handled the series of unfortunate events on Saturday night and what you think about this week’s game against Kentucky by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.

Gamecock Central is introducing a free text alert service later this year.

Text USC to 877-462-6257 to sign up.

By texting this number, you agree to receive promotional messages sent via an autodialer, and this agreement isn’t a condition of any purchase. I also agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. You'll receive approx. four messages/month. Message & Data rates may apply. To unsubscribe, text STOP to 8774626257.