Scott Davis: Serenity Now

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Scott has followed Gamecock sports for more than 30 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. His columns appear on Gamecock Central each Monday during football season and other times throughout the year.

I woke up thinking about Seinfeld.

It was the morning after Clemson had won its fifth straight game in the annual rivalry contest against my South Carolina Gamecocks, and I lingered in the bed, staring at the ceiling and feeling all the same emotions I’ve felt during every similar “morning after” throughout my lifetime.

I felt sadness, rage, paralysis, confusion, frustration, self-pity, doubt, fear. I also felt something else, something that scared me.

I felt acceptance.

And I didn’t want to feel acceptance.

As a Gamecock fan, I didn’t want to believe that losing to Clemson was a way of life or a birthright. I didn’t want to kneel and surrender to the idea that the Tigers would perpetually find themselves in the College Football Playoff without any resistance whatsoever from the University of South Carolina.

It was a grim place to be: I didn’t like my present reality, but I wasn’t sure exactly what I could do to change it.

So I started shouting “Serenity Now!” over and over again.

Not out loud or anything. But in my head. Repeatedly.

Believe it or not, this didn’t work.

If you’re a fan of the ‘90s sitcom Seinfeld as I am, you’ll doubtless remember the famous episode where George’s father is told to scream the phrase “Serenity Now” any time he feels his anger boiling up. Throughout the episode, most of the various characters in the show attempt to quell their frustration by yelling it, only to find that it makes them angrier and angrier.

Here, you deserve to laugh today and you know I’m going to take care of you.

You ever heard of the Serenity Prayer?

If you haven’t, learn it. I use it every day. The words may be familiar, but as corny as it may sound when applied to something as relatively meaningless as college football, we’d actually do well to read those words again and again today.

God,

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.

As Frank Sinatra once said, “I’m for whatever gets you through the night,” and if the Serenity Prayer can help Gamecock fans cope when their team loses again to Clemson in football, then by all means, let’s use it, examine it and act on it. Whatever gets us through the night.

In the wake of yet another loss to Clemson, and yet another run towards the national title by our enemies in Pickens County, here are the questions that South Carolina’s fans, administrators, coaches and other various leaders should be asking themselves:

What are the things we cannot change and how do we respond to them?

What are the things we can change and how do we go about changing them?

How do we know the difference between the two?

One thing I’m absolutely sure of is that this column isn’t going to solve anything. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try to find the answers anyway and pretend that we have them. Isn’t that what sports fans do?

Serenity now!

Let’s start with the obvious, but often forgotten, reality: As fans, we can’t change much of anything that happens to South Carolina’s football team.

For the most part, all we can do is hope, dream, wish upon a star, pray and endure.

Sure, we can give more money to the university, and buy more tickets to games, and scream a little louder at Williams-Brice Stadium, and not Tweet dumb things to potential recruits, but for the most part, fans are the lovelorn losers in an unrequited affair. Our teams can do anything they want to us, and we have to take it.

That’s never going to change.

If that sounds too difficult a cross to bear, then you have a single solution: Stop following sports. The end.

You may not like it, but you can’t draw up defensive schemes, or throw passes, or catch passes, or recruit five-star athletes. As fans, just about the only thing we can control is how we react to what we see happening on the field. Beyond that, you and I have about as much impact on the proceedings at hand as the stars and the weather.

And if we look specifically at the Clemson-South Carolina rivalry, there are other things that South Carolina’s players, coaches and administrators cannot change, either:

We Can’t Change the Fact that Clemson Plays in the Atlantic Coast Conference, Nor Does That Have Anything to Do With Us – Here is the cold, stark reality: As long as Clemson is recruiting at the level that they are currently recruiting, they are almost certainly going to enter the South Carolina game with a record of 11-0 or 10-1, or at the absolute worst, 9-2. They are recruiting at the level of Alabama and Georgia and Ohio State while playing Wake Forest and Boston College and Georgia Tech and Duke. Those are the facts.

And that has nothing whatsoever to do with our game against them.

Nor can it ever, EVER be used as an excuse to lose to them.

The reality is, most of the South Carolina-Clemson games over the last half-decade haven’t been particularly competitive. The Tigers have dominated the Gamecocks and would likely have done so whether they played an ACC schedule, an SEC schedule or an NFL schedule.

When the Gamecocks lose to SEC rivals like Georgia or Florida, we don’t whine about the schedule that the Bulldogs and Gators play. We accept the reality that those teams are better than us, and hopefully, try to figure out why.

For far too long, Gamecock fans have pointed to Clemson’s schedule to excuse away the Tigers’ excellence. It’s time to stop clinging to that tired old chestnut.

We Can’t Change the Fact That Our Rivals – Including Clemson – Will Do Everything Possible to Field Winning Football Programs – We play in the SEC. Everyone cares. Everyone tries. It’s never going to change. Competition is fierce and will stay fierce. Win anyway. While we’re here…

We Can’t Change Clemson’s Sales Pitch – The Tigers have won two national titles in football and a trophy case of ACC championships. For the last few years, they’ve been a fixture in the College Football Playoff.

We’ve, uh, played in an SEC Championship Game in 2010 and won a few Outback Bowls. George Rogers won the Heisman almost 40 years ago, which was cool.

The bottom line? We aren’t going to win many recruiting battles on tradition or history.

Other Things We Can’t Change – Columbia is the state capital and Clemson is a college town, Williams-Brice Stadium is not located on USC’s campus, our mascot is a rooster, Kirk Herbstreit’s sons are going to play for Clemson, Dabo Swinney is a good salesman, Clemson’s football operations building has a slide in it. The good news? We don’t need to change any of those things to build a winning tradition.

So what can we change? What are the things within our control? Many of the following are obvious choices, which means they’re easy to identify and hard to do. Still, most of the time the obvious solutions are obvious for a reason. That’s why we need to…

Find New and More Creative Ways to Recruit Elite Athletes – And no, I’m not talking about cheating to lure them here.

South Carolina has generally recruited pretty well over the last decade or so. The problem is that recruiting “reasonably well” isn’t good enough when you play a schedule filled with teams who recruit at an elite level, including the Clemson Tigers.

This is where fans typically throw up their hands and ask, “How can we out-recruit teams with more tradition, more winning, more everything than we have?”

Remember the lessons from “Moneyball,” when the cash-strapped Oakland A’s found new ways to win in what appeared to be a rigged game? As salaries exploded in Major League Baseball, A’s general manager Billy Beane realized he’d never be able to compete with the Yankees and Red Sox for the best players if it all simply boiled down to dollars. So he exploited inefficiencies in the system to target players he knew to be valuable who other teams overlooked.

Much as I hate to do it, I give Clemson credit for realizing the recruiting landscape had changed several years ago. They used social media and other tools to invent a coolness factor for their program, something that began paying dividends when they went 6-7, lost in the Belk Bowl and yet found a way to reel in a difference-making recruiting class anyway. That class ended up laying the foundation for all of the success they’ve had since.

Yes, the rich are typically the ones who get richer in college football, but there’s always a way for a savvy, relentless recruiting organization to make breakthroughs even when fortunes are low on the football field. It happens every single year.

And it’s not about copying what other successful recruiting organizations do, either. It’s about figuring out what those programs are missing, and rushing in to fill the void for athletes who are searching for something new. That’s what the A’s did in the “Moneyball” era. They figured out what the competition was missing and exploited it.

Everyone now has a DJ in the stands, and cool hype videos, and utilizes social media. What can we do that no one else is doing that will help us draw the best players in the country here? That’s the most important question we need to answer moving forward.

Delivering Our Best Performances Against the Best Competition – I enjoy watching the Gamecocks defeat Missouri and Vanderbilt. And going 7-5 is a whole lot more palatable to my emotional well-being than going 0-11 (like the Gamecocks did in Lou Holtz’s first season). Still, it’s been a very long time since the South Carolina program reeled in a signature victory that made the college football world sit up and take notice.

Remember that shocking upset of No. 1 Alabama in 2010? It wasn’t just that Carolina won the game, it was that they thoroughly and completely manhandled the Tide at a time when Bama had just won a title and put together a 20-game winning streak. Though it seemed to come out of nowhere, the victory propelled USC to an SEC East title and then three consecutive 11-win seasons.

Outlasting a 5-7 Ole Miss team isn’t going to be the kind of win to make recruits everywhere rethink the South Carolina Gamecocks. Beating Georgia in Athens next year would. Yes, it’s hard to do. And yes, there are many factors you cannot control here – sometimes you’ll play a superior opponent, deliver your best performance and lose anyway.

But losing to ranked opponents and quality teams has become part of South Carolina’s core identity. Would you say, in your honest opinion, that we have delivered our most creative, most bold, most bloodthirsty strategies in games against the likes of Georgia, Florida and Clemson over the last few seasons? Would you say that we’ve approached those games like the football program would be disbanded if we lost them?

If not, perhaps it’s time to start.

Other Things We Can Change – Make no mistake about it – all of the minor improvements that USC administrators have made to improve the gameday atmosphere at Williams-Brice over the last few years (like adding a giant video board, bringing in a DJ, painting the stadium, reimagining the Farmer’s Market, loading up on Justin King’s hype videos and more) do matter. Instead of grumbling about them, fans should encourage more creative changes to keep the momentum moving in the right direction.

Here comes the tough part: How do you know when a change at the top needs to happen, or if you’re making changes just for the sake of making changes? To put it even more plainly, when do you come to the realization that things aren’t working (whether it’s with the coaching staff or the athletic administration itself) and make the appropriate changes?

I’ll be honest: I don’t know the answer.

No one cares what I think, nor should they, but for what it’s worth, I definitely do not think a change in leadership is warranted, needed or welcome at the present time. This coaching staff has held the program together during difficult circumstances, and the administration seems willing to commit to whatever is necessary to change our fortunes.

Beyond that, I don’t know what I think about what the future holds.

What I do know is this: South Carolina has the resources it needs to defeat Clemson – or anyone else – in football.

Does it have the resolve, the creativity, the audacity and the willingness to actually make that happen?

Time will tell.

Until then…

Serenity.

Now.