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.

I felt like a superhero on Saturday.

Just in time for Halloween, I was an indomitable new costumed crusader who had all the latest and greatest powers and capabilities – leaping tall buildings, shooting lasers with my eyes, and most importantly, not bursting into sobs while watching my favorite football team.

Call me the Bye-onic Man.

After eight often grueling games, the South Carolina football team had at last reached its Bye Week. There would be no offensive struggles on this day, no false start penalties, no personal fouls, no turnovers, no SEC Network graphics that proclaimed the Gamecocks had compiled six total yards through nearly three quarters.

No. Not today.

This was a day when I would be refreshed, renewed and ultimately unstoppable, the man I’d always known I could become.

All that was required was for me to get through a day without watching football.

Astonishingly, I was excited about that.

Try as we might, we’ll never fully understand how the Bye Week works its magic. We wait all year for football – nine endless, drifting months – and we fill the yawning chasm in our lives with Pretend Football, football-like activities such as recruiting and spring practice and new uniform announcements, and we talk and talk and talk about Real Football.

And then Real Football gets here and…often we end up ecstatic at the prospect of stepping away from it just a couple of weeks later. Though it bounces and bounds into our lives just once a week, it consumes those weeks so completely when it is here that we spend the other six days recovering from the previous game and getting ourselves mentally straight for the next one.

Loving football is a full-contact sport under the best of circumstances.

But if you love a football team that is in the earliest stages of a years-long rebuilding project? That requires something superhuman.

It requires the smiling patience of 10,000 kindergarten teachers. It requires the warm and tender affection of 10,000 Moms, and the stern, unflagging encouragement of 10,000 Dads, and the “you kids get anything you want” indulgence of 10,000 grandparents.

And just at the precise moment when we’re beginning to believe we aren’t cut out to be superheroes, the Bye Week arrives, injects its peace and its hope and its renewal into our weary bodies, and we emerge ready to take on the world again.

At least, that’s the idea.

I awoke Saturday morning prepared for anything.

Anything except football.

This would be a day when I’d actually pretend to be a good husband. Need me to run errands? Need me to tinker around the house? Need me to walk the dog? I’m your Superman.

My wife and I spent the day doing Couple Stuff, stuff that could include the participation of a loving spouse, stuff that didn’t involve me sitting in a chair for 12 consecutive hours and yelling at announcers on a television screen who could not hear me and did not know I existed.

We drove through the North Georgia hills and stared longingly at autumn leaves. We wandered through some outlet stores (who’s fired up for Pottery Barn?????) We ate Mexican food. We purchased a serving bowl at Crate & Barrel. These were the types of rock-solid marital activities that had been unimaginable since early August.

Like a recently domesticated wolfhound who’d just been brought home from the shelter, I trotted behind Mrs. Davis at shopping centers and parking lots across the northern suburbs of Atlanta, faithfully wagging my tail and radiating good cheer.

At no point did I allow my eyes to drift towards a screen that might be showing Southeastern Conference football. Not intentionally, at least.

True, I’ll admit that after we got home, there was a moment – a moment that lasted no longer than 45 minutes, an hour tops – in which I relapsed and allowed the second half of the Georgia-Florida game to blare in the background of our serene afternoon. But this was the Cocktail Party, and everyone knows there are loopholes in the law that grandfather the Cocktail Party into even a non-football Saturday.

And, in the interest of full disclosure, I must also acknowledge an additional setback that involved me not turning the channel away from the Auburn-Ole Miss broadcast in a sufficiently speedy manner, which had the effect of letting it play uninterrupted for – oh, I don’t know – two hours or so. Still, in general, this was an absolutely football-free Saturday, thank God.

As I said, I needed to be rejuvenated.

And after a day without football, I felt so spectacularly rejuvenated by Saturday night that I couldn’t see any harm in glancing at Penn State-Ohio State over on ABC.

I mean, these weren’t even SEC teams. This didn’t even count as football, did it?

Also not football? The World Series.

So obviously it was still legal to watch that, right? Right.

South Carolina’s first game of 2021 – the inaugural game for new head coach Shane Beamer – has the odd distinction of seeming like it just happened yesterday while also feeling like it occurred during the early Middle Ages before the discovery of America.

So much has happened already, and yet most of us feel no closer to knowing how long this rebuild will last or even whether meaningful progress has been made in the restoration project.

Most of us knew the Gamecocks faced a talent deficit entering the 2021 season. Most of us knew we weren’t ready to battle Georgia for a spot in Atlanta or battle our way towards a New Year’s Day bowl game (or perhaps any bowl game – New Year’s or not).

With eight games in the books, what’s left us all feeling a little punch-drunk has been the team’s weekly willingness to beat itself – the penalties and turnovers and unforced errors that have had the strange effect of making a relatively non-descript 4-4 team seem occasionally like a sociopathic torment to watch play football.

That’s the crazy thing: There are still, after all this, a few things to play for in this topsy-turvy season.

Contrary to popular belief (and the sporadic rantings of your friendly neighborhood columnist here), this team is not 0-8, but 4-4 with three games to play. That’s not going to be commemorated with a statue in the State Fairgrounds, but it’s not legendarily disastrous, either.

A bowl bid, however unlikely, still floats out there in the ether. You find a way to outlast a deeply uneven Missouri team, and who knows? There may yet still be a way to salvage this season and turn it into a lasting foundation for the future.

But that will require the team to get locked in for the final third in a way it has never quite done in the first two-thirds of ’21.

One way or the other, I’ll be watching. You will be, too.

We’re refreshed, rejuvenated, bye-onic.

Maybe we’re crazy, but we are indeed ready for some football.

Again.

Check out my weekly newsletter, arriving on Friday to in-boxes everywhere, and tell me how you spent your Bye Week and what you hope to see from the Gamecocks in the final third of the season 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.