Scott Davis has followed Gamecock sports for more than 30 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. You can reach Scott at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.

I drove back to Atlanta from Greenville late Saturday afternoon after South Carolina lost for the sixth straight time in its in-state rivalry game.

The post-Thanksgiving traffic was lethal. For nearly 150 miles, I rolled forward, tapped the brakes, rolled forward, slammed the brakes, rolled forward, came to a complete stop for reasons that never became clear. Brake lights flashed everywhere in the dusk. Cars flew by me in the right-hand lane in an effort to pass the un-passable clog, then when it became obvious there was nowhere to go, they tried to squeeze back into a left-hand lane that had no room.

This, surely, is what hell feels like: An endless interstate crawling with cars, a wind-blasted and rainy landscape, gray skies, fast food billboards. And it goes on and on and on.

For hours, I had nothing to do but tap a brake and think. That’s never good.

And after awhile, my journey on the highway to hell started seeming like a perfect metaphor for what this long off-season will feel like for South Carolina football.

The scenery may slowly change (New coaches! New philosophies!). And ultimately we’re going to wind up somewhere. But the main concern is how the experience of the drive itself will change us. We’re already a grumpy, tired, flustered group, and there are still miles to go.

And are we headed anywhere good? Or will we all still be stuck on this interstate at this time next year?

After a deflating, inevitable 38-3 flop against Clemson, many Gamecock fans like me are clinging to the hope that coach Will Muschamp can somehow transform his legacy while it’s still being written, much like Ed Orgeron just did at LSU. Orgeron, of course, is an ace recruiter and strong defensive mind (much like Muschamp) who flamed out rather spectacularly as the head coach at Ole Miss (much like Muschamp did at Florida), who was passed over as the head coach at Southern Cal despite a decent stint as its interim coach, who became the interim coach at LSU after Les Miles’ abrupt firing and survived a few OK-ish seasons (by LSU standards) and wasn’t particularly a fan favorite in Baton Rouge…until all of the sudden the Tigers stormed through this season undefeated, won the SEC West and are a leading contender to win the national title.

That’s an example of patience prevailing, right? That’s the reward for staying in the car and continuing to drive forward even on an interstate that doesn’t seem to be moving. Right?

It’s complicated.

The reality is that for every Orgeron, there are dozens of coaches who are given one last chance to fix whatever the trouble spot seems to be (whether it’s offense or defense or something vague like “toughness”) who hang on for another season or two of limbo and uncertainty before the plug gets pulled a season or two too late. For every Orgeron, there’s a Bill Curry (forced out at Alabama, then fired at Kentucky), or a Houston Nutt (resigned before being fired at Arkansas, fired at Ole Miss).

Sometimes we keep waiting and waiting for a guy to figure it out. And we keep waiting right until he’s asked to leave. Again.

It’s also worth pointing out that it’s easier to recruit elite athletes to LSU than to South Carolina for a wide variety of reasons (the Tigers own the talent-rich state of Louisiana and don’t share it with any other major program, and they have a winning tradition to boot). In other words, this isn’t an apples-to-apples deal.

For this thing to work, it would seem that Muschamp would need a seismic makeover: Bold, wholesale changes of the sort he’s shied away from in eight years as a head coach, reevaluating his entire approach and retooling his philosophy and having some sort of “Road to Damascus” life-changing experience where everything that isn’t working falls away in favor of a fresh vision for the future. And at that point, what’s the difference from just hiring someone new?

Which doesn’t mean that wiping the slate clean and starting from scratch is the answer, either.

Because that’s the route South Carolina has tried time and time again throughout the lonely decades of Gamecock football. There’s a new savior every few years in Columbia, and with the notable exception of Steve Spurrier, those saviors always soon give way to other saviors.

The constant churning of regimes and administrations leads to the kind of everlasting turmoil that keeps elite athletes far, far away from your locker room, and the losses keep piling up, and before long it’s time to change coaches again. We’ve rinsed, lathered and repeated so many times that we’re running out of shampoo.

So, then…we should stay the course, right? Right? Follow the old Virginia Tech-Frank Beamer model? You remember: Tech went an ugly 24-40-2 in Beamer’s first six seasons at the helm, but kept the faith, and eventually he won three Big East titles and four ACC titles and went to roughly 6,000 straight bowl games in Blacksburg.

Is that the solution?

No one knows.

We’re in a place where anything and nothing seems possible. We’re stuck.

We’ve been driving for hours, there are cars filling every square inch of the road in front of us, brake lights are flashing in the dusk.

And there’s no end in sight.

Remember those butterflies you used to feel on the morning of a South Carolina-Clemson game? I do.

I remember an almost nauseous burning in the pit of my stomach, a hopeful longing that survived inside me even when the Gamecocks were struggling and I expected defeat. The idea of losing to them tormented me, and the hope that we could disrupt and dismay their lives electrified me, and I wandered around in the days after Thanksgiving a frenzied, jangly ball of nerve endings.

Sometimes it worked out and sometimes it didn’t, and I might have been losing my mind, but I felt totally and completely alive on the morning of a South Carolina-Clemson game.

Saturday? I felt hungry.

I spent the morning scrolling through Yelp on my phone and trying to figure out a suitable brunch spot in downtown Greenville. The annual blood feud with Clemson was a distant, dull blot in the back of my mind, somewhere on the list of things I needed to check off along with picking up a Christmas tree and filling the car with gas.

As the loss gathered steam and the Williams-Brice Stadium crowd settled into an eerie calm, I looked on with numb acceptance. I’d become numb to all this several losses and national championships ago. It felt as normal as daybreak: Six in a row. Whatever.

Was it really just 2013 that the Gamecocks wrapped up their fifth straight win in this rivalry? That now seems like something from an era of black-and-white photographs.

The last time this thing was even competitive was, oddly enough, during that strange Shawn Elliott interregnum in 2015, when South Carolina made a game of it before losing 37-32. Since then? Final scores of 56-7, 34-10, 56-35 and 38-3 (and it should tell you all you need to know about the state of this “rivalry” that Gamecock fans talked themselves into feeling good about the outcome last season after a game in which their team lost by three touchdowns).

Things can change quickly in college football, and they do all the time (I mean, did anyone expect Florida State to fall apart this completely this quickly?), but there’s no doubt about it: The South Carolina-Clemson rivalry is showing every sign of falling into one of those non-rivalry rivalry games that are rivalries in name only, like the Ohio State-Michigan game (which has been won by OSU 14 of 15 times) or the Virginia Tech-Virginia game (where the Hokies had won 15 straight before losing this year) or the Georgia-Georgia Tech game (Georgia has won 16 of the last 19 games).

Like the vast majority of fans in the age of high-definition TV and widespread broadcasts of college football games, I watched most of South Carolina’s games on television this season. And as I’ve written many times already this year, I’m continually struck by the sheer strangeness of watching USC’s dull, seemingly preordained losses when they are viewed in tandem with the fascinating, throbbing, beating heart of college football that thrums throughout any given Saturday.

On Saturday, I got home in time to see the second half of the Auburn-Alabama passion play from the Plains. Looking upon the difference between this atmosphere and the one at Williams-Brice Stadium on Saturday was like watching an elderly person nap on the couch in a suburban den, followed by watching two lions fight each other to the death for three hours on an African safari.

It’s like the two things didn’t even belong in the same universe.

I remember, not that long ago, when Steve Spurrier was so under the skin of Dabo Swinney that Clemson’s coach burst into an incoherent, paranoid rant following another loss to the Gamecocks (just as his team was preparing for the ACC title game, of all things) about “real USC’s” and “real Carolina’s” and other hilarity.

That rivalry felt like a rivalry.

This one feels like an autopsy.

So what’s left?

The same thing that is always left for Gamecock fans: We keep driving.

We keep driving even though the car rarely moves. Even though other programs zip by us and force themselves into our lane. Even though there are brake lights flashing as far as the eye can see.

We keep driving. It’s the only thing we can do out here on a crowded interstate.

Hopefully, someday, we’ll actually arrive.