Scott Davis: The Identity Project

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.

You don’t just remember what the great teams did.

You remember who they were.

Steve Spurrier’s Florida Gators were the Fun ‘n Gun boys, the guys who slung it deep, the guys who could score on you at any time and from anywhere – and who never stopped trying to. Tom Osborne’s Nebraska teams won with mobile, shifty quarterbacks who could operate a confounding and maddeningly efficient option attack. Nick Saban’s Crimson Tide has won and continues to win via a recruiting machine that stockpiles elite athletes everywhere, allowing them to play a hot hand each year and lean on whatever seems to be working – one year it might be with defense, one year it might be a bruising running game, one year it might be through a dynamic signal caller and speedy wide receivers.

You can usually summarize the legends in a sentence or less. Spurrier: Slinging it. Osborne: Option. Saban: Recruiting.

It’s not impossible to build a winning program without some sort of foundational principle, but the history of college football tells us that it doesn’t happen very often, or for very long.

For South Carolina football, Saturday night’s 16-10 loss to Kentucky put the spotlight on the ultimate project that first-year head coach Shane Beamer and his staff must shoulder in trying to establish a foothold in Columbia. This program desperately needs an identity, something to hang its hat on, a mission statement, a reason for being, a purpose in life.

Particularly on offense, South Carolina groped through the Will Muschamp years without anything resembling a personality or sense of self. The Gamecocks simply didn’t know who they were. Were they a running team? A quarterback-focused passing attack? Did they prefer mobile quarterbacks or drop-back passers? Did they want athletic and quick offensive linemen or big, burly bullies in the trenches?

Is “all of the above” an option?

After four games under a new regime, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the South Carolina offense is still feeling the long-term side effects of that half-decade identity crisis. In similar fashion to those Muschamp offenses, these Gamecocks appear to want desperately to establish a running game, and when they can’t, there doesn’t yet seem to be a solid Plan B. If I had to describe this offense in a sentence, even one in which I described what I thought they were trying to be, I probably couldn’t do it right now.

And listen. Take deep breaths with me because we’re going to get through this together. I get it. I promise I get it.

We’re four games into this thing. Four games. You don’t establish an identity overnight. You might not even do it in a season. Nick Saban went 6-6 and lost to Louisiana-Monroe in his first year at Alabama. This is a long-term, ongoing project that never really ends, and we’ve just barely taken the first couple of steps in the journey, and you lose one game to a solid Kentucky team and all the sudden whiny nerds like me emerge out of the woodwork wondering, “Hey, what’s your identity, man?”

I get it, I get it, I get it.

South Carolina fans will have to be patient – again – while the work unfolds. It’s so early the rooster hasn’t even crowed to announce the dawn yet.

Still, as I look back through the history of South Carolina football across the decades, a single unifying theme seems to come into focus amidst all the mediocrity: I have trouble describing who most of those teams were, or even who they wanted to be.

I don’t know what their founding principles were, or if they had any. I don’t know what the vision was, don’t have any feel for what they hoped to accomplish.

It should be clear to all of us by now that building a program-wide identity is Shane Beamer’s central project at South Carolina. Let’s hope that in four years, when someone says “South Carolina football,” we’ll know exactly what they mean by it.

The Christie Davis Game Balls of the Week

Does anyone in a Gamecock uniform want to step forward and lay claim to the namesake of the weekly Game Balls? Even my wife wondered aloud on Saturday night whether we’d have to keep them named after her for the entire 2021 season. It’s trending that way. A congratulatory Christie goes out to:

The Crowd – After the South Carolina offense finally joined the action at the beginning of the second half with a touchdown to close the gap to 10-7, the old stadium on George Rogers Boulevard came alive in a way that it hasn’t during the last few seasons. The ESPN 2 announcing crew repeatedly referenced the electric atmosphere, which left sideline reporter Lauren Sisler so impressed that she almost had me convinced the place was about to levitate into the heavens. I’m telling you, these fans are hungry for something good to happen. They are famished. If this program can find its footing at all – and I mean, at all – this is a fan base that is ready, willing and able to shower them with love and gratitude. I think you’d have to go back almost 40 years to the early ‘80s to find a point in time when the fan base was this ready to experience something worth feeling good about. My God, I hope they find it.

Me, for Writing the Following Sentence About the South Carolina Running Attack After the Eastern Illinois Game – “This is a potent unit with a lot of options.” Since then, the Gamecocks struggled to establish the run for three quarters against East Carolina before being rescued by Juju McDowell, then followed that up with a ghastly 34-carry-for-82-yard rushing performance against Georgia. Then they followed that up by rushing for 58 yards against Kentucky on Saturday night. I guess what I’m saying is, this South Carolina running game may be many things right now, but “potent” is not one of them.

Recovering Fumble After Fumble and Turning it Into Zero Points – The Gamecock defense kept coming up with extra chances for their counterparts on the offense, but South Carolina could do nothing with the good fortune. In a gruesome stretch during the second half, the Gamecock defenders pounced on Kentucky fumbles twice near midfield, only to watch the offense immediately sputter. I hate to be Cliché Guy when I’m watching a football game, but I’ll hold my hand up and admit to blurting out “If you can’t score after recovering two fumbles at midfield, you just don’t deserve to win this football game” during a particularly low point.

Mark Stoops’ Mystifying Mastery of South Carolina Football – With the win on Saturday night, Kentucky head coach Mark Stoops improved to a sterling 26-42 in SEC play while overseeing the program in Lexington. Seven of those 26 league wins – more than a quarter – have come against South Carolina. More than a quarter. Stoops has won seven of eight against the Gamecocks in a run of dominance that is as strange as any I’ve ever experienced in four decades as a USC follower.

Let’s start with this: Yes, Kentucky is an improved program in Stoops’ nine years at the helm. They’ve always had a few frightening players at the skill positions, and it wasn’t unusual to run into a scary Wildcat quarterback or running back from year to year. Stoops’ Kentucky is stronger in the trenches and on defense – in other words, they’re much closer to being a prototypical SEC team than they’ve been at any point in the last 30 years.

And now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s get to the heart of the matter: For nearly a decade now, South Carolina has been losing to a Kentucky program that just isn’t making much noise against the rest of the SEC. This isn’t like losing for a decade straight to Spurrier’s Gators in the ‘90s while Florida was running roughshod over everyone else in the league. It isn’t even like losing again and again to a Texas A&M team that has five-star players all over the roster. No, if you examine Stoops’ SEC record, you’ll find that he’s been successful against Vanderbilt, Missouri, South Carolina and…not really anyone else.

I don’t think it’s South Carolina’s birthright to defeat Kentucky in football. Despite the fact that the Wildcats have historically been an also-ran in the SEC, things change all the time, and I’d be more than willing to laud the Kentucky program if they were annually winning SEC East titles (or even competing for the SEC East). As an example, I’d point out that Vanderbilt was not historically a powerhouse baseball program, but they became one over the last decade and they’ve been one for long enough now that I now feel downright ecstatic when South Carolina defeats Vanderbilt in baseball. It doesn’t take long for most fans to recognize another program’s ascension when it becomes undeniable.

By any measure, though, Kentucky has not been establishing an elite program while feasting on the Gamecocks these last few years. After Saturday, the Wildcats’ next three opponents are Florida, LSU and Georgia, and I doubt it would surprise too many folks outside of Lexington if UK found itself at 4-3 heading into their game against Mississippi State. Meanwhile, South Carolina fans may talk a lot about competing with Georgia and Florida, but let’s make no mistake about it: The Gamecocks must start consistently beating the likes of Kentucky and Missouri and Ole Miss and Mississippi State before they can worry about what’s happening in Gainesville or Athens. Keep an eye on the South Carolina-Kentucky matchup going forward. If this is a game that the Gamecocks still aren’t at least occasionally winning in four or five years, well…we can probably imagine how they’ll be faring against the rest of the league.

For now, though, fans like us probably shouldn’t spend too much time wondering what this program will look like in 2025 or 2026. Our hope today, in this moment, is to find ourselves following a program that knows who it is and who it wants to be.

Check out my weekly newsletter, arriving on Friday to in-boxes everywhere, and tell me what you want to see from South Carolina in Week Five and let it rip on any other topic by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.

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