Scott Davis: The Offensive Seduction

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.

As the clock ticked to zero on Alabama’s thorough and decisive dismantling of South Carolina on Saturday, I did something odd.

Nothing.

I didn’t hurl a television remote into the couch pillows. I didn’t scream at my dog or fire off angry text messages. I didn’t go for one of those long, soul-searching walks around the neighborhood like I did after the Gamecocks frittered away the season opener against North Carolina.

In fact, I didn’t do anything noteworthy at all other than walk over to the pantry, open a bag of Lay’s and eat a couple of hundred potato chips.

South Carolina had lost by 24 points, given up a staggering 570-plus yards on defense and was never truly in the football game at any time in the second half, and yet I walked away from the experience feeling a strange sense of calm.

Why?

Like many of you, I’d been seduced by offense.

Whether you want to admit it or not, you’ve been there before. You watch South Carolina make mistakes or get outclassed by a team with superior talent, and yet when it’s all over, you strangely find yourself telling friends things like, “Well, at least we moved the ball all day.”

And move the ball the Gamecocks did against the second-ranked Tide. They moved it on their first drive, their last drive and just about every drive in between during a game where true freshman Ryan Hilinski threw for 324 yards and two touchdowns, and running back Rico Dowdle rushed for 102 yards against a team that played in the national title game last year.

Apparently, that was all I needed to see to file this game under the “I’m Proud of Their Effort” classification instead of the “Why Do I Follow This Sport?” category where I’d assigned the UNC game. So here we are again, trying to talk ourselves into feeling kinda sorta not nearly as bad as we thought we’d feel after a game that South Carolina lost emphatically.

We’ve done this before.

We did it last year after Jake Bentley and Deebo Samuel passed and ran all over Clemson’s legendary defense in Death Valley (Final score: Clemson 56-South Carolina 35). We even did it a couple of years ago after something called the Birmingham Bowl when the Gamecocks scored a ton of points under true freshman quarterback Bentley (and lost the football game to the mighty Bulls of South Florida by a score of 46-39).

The buzz among fans following that Birmingham Bowl seemed to be that the program had finally found itself with a potent offense to go hand in hand with the stingy defense that Will Muschamp would (surely, certainly) eventually bring. Did that happen? Well, within a year, then-offensive coordinator Kurt Roper had been fired and replaced by Bryan McClendon, and Bentley never quite reached his potential as South Carolina’s starting quarterback.

You might also remember that the Gamecocks followed last year’s game against Clemson with its worst stretch of offensive performances in the Will Muschamp Era.

So, you know, no.

It didn’t happen.

But that didn’t stop all of us from feeling in the vicinity of the area of the neighborhood of okay after Alabama crushed the Gamecocks on Saturday.

Because hey, we moved the ball.

For whatever reason, fans feel worse when they lose with a bad offense than they do when they lose with a bad defense.

You felt absolutely dreadful the day after that North Carolina loss for many reasons: The Gamecocks had better talent than the Heels, they led the game for three quarters before shooting themselves in the foot (and hands and torso and heart and brain), they gave up numbingly long runs on defense again and again.

Mostly, though, you felt dreadful because the Gamecock offense played tight, joyless, unimaginative, terrified football. They played not to lose, not to make mistakes and not to stand out in any way, good or bad.

On Saturday, they played just about as badly on defense as they did on offense in that UNC game, but for whatever reason, we feel better about it.

Let’s face it: We fans are completely and totally under the spell of offense. Offense whispers its sweet-nothings in our ears (“Did you see some of those bullets Hilinski threw and the way he stepped up in the pocket when rushed? Didn’t Dowdle look unstoppable at times?”), and we melt like schoolgirls.

Offense is really what we care about – even teams who win consistently find themselves having to make excuses if their offense underperforms or they are routinely bailed out by a strong defense. All of us – every single one of us – wants to score points and stockpile yards at the expense of just about anything else.

As the dust settled on Saturday, South Carolina was 1-2 on the season and 0-1 in the SEC with a wave of difficult games remaining, but against all odds, I decided I could live with the effort. The Gamecocks don’t look anywhere close to joining the SEC’s upper echelon at the moment, but I could live with it.

Offense seduced me.

It always does.

Remember the “Good Job! Good Effort!” Kid from a couple of years ago? After the Miami Heat (with LeBron James and Dwyane Wade) lost a playoff game to the Boston Celtics, a kid sitting near the tunnel repeatedly screamed “Good job! Good effort!” at the Heat’s players as they somberly returned to the locker room. The youngster ended up becoming a meme of sorts for the idea of supporting your team – or a doomed cause, or whatever – through thick and thin. You can check out the Good Job Kid’s fine work here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lOL2h8F3aA. Most of us probably felt like the Good Job Kid on Saturday, when the Gamecocks at least had the dignity to put up a fight against a football team that was clearly light years beyond them in the talent. Let’s toss our first Game Ball to:

Effort – Isn’t this, in the end, the one thing we truly want and need to see from our favorite sports teams? It’s what seemed entirely absent from the Gamecock players in that UNC game, and even though it was obvious within the first few minutes of Saturday’s game that South Carolina didn’t have the horses to hang with Bama, they battled until the clock reached triple zeros and never allowed the contest to slip away into one of those 66-7-type disasters that leave you contemplating selling your season tickets on Stub Hub. I’ve been a Gamecock fan for decades and I’ve seen a looooooooooooooot of teams allow themselves to get overwhelmed by superior talent, take a knee on the entire contest somewhere in the second quarter and get run out of the stadium. That could have happened on Saturday, and the fact that it didn’t is a testament to the determination of the players currently wearing garnet and black.

Playing to Win – Some fans will make angry noises about Will Muschamp’s unexpected transformation into a swaggering Rambling, Gambling Man on Saturday (when South Carolina faked a field goal, faked a punt, tried an onside kick and repeatedly went for it in fourth down situations), but I won’t. Ignore those fans. Do we not play these football games to win, or was the goal on Saturday merely to keep from getting the doors blown off? Muschamp said – correctly – after the game that USC probably had little chance of winning without putting a heaping helping of touchdowns on the board. And that prediction looked very sound indeed after Alabama’s Tua Tagavailoa threw for a career-best 444 yards with five touchdowns. Most of the gambles failed (and some even backfired), but going into attack mode was the only solution to the problem of playing an Alabama team with elite talent at every position.

Williams-Brice Stadium for a Half or So – With the suddenly scrappy Gamecocks refusing to kneel in the arena for the first half, the Williams-Brice Stadium crowd came alive in a way that it hasn’t since the Steve Spurrier glory days. The faint echoes of that resilient Gamecock spirit seemed to be stirring in the old stadium on George Rogers Boulevard, at least for a moment or two. It reminded me for the 100,000th time just how special our fans can be at times – something we all can forget when we’re plunged into turbulent seas after games like that UNC opener.

Hilinski, Dowdle, Bryan Edwards, Shi Smith and Offense with a Capital “O” – It wasn’t nearly enough, but it made us feel better. Admit it – it did. Hilinski may not be ready to put the entire team on his back and go win a football game on his own, but he was anything but overwhelmed by the moment. That will have to be enough for now.

Believe it or not, when my football team loses by more than three touchdowns to anyone – even the program that has won a couple of million national championships across the decades – I’m going to hand out a Deflated Ball or two, starting with:

The Slant – South Carolina couldn’t defend it Saturday, and what was frightening about so many of the Tide’s touchdowns was how easily they came. Tagavailoa didn’t need to throw deep balls to help his team score in seconds. All he had to do was fire a short ball to one of his many elite receivers running a slant, and watch as they left defender after defender in the dust. There wasn’t anything fancy about the Tide’s offensive game plan on Saturday, nor did there need to be. They had better and faster players, put them in the right positions and let them be better and faster. South Carolina looks far, far away from being competitive on defense right now. While we’re here, let’s don’t forget…

Tackling – It was in short supply for the Gamecock defense. Wrapping up isn’t something this group is terribly interested in right now.

Signature Wins – Tired of hearing about how Will Muschamp just can’t record a meaningful win against a quality opponent as South Carolina’s head coach? I have bad news for you. You’ll keep hearing it for the foreseeable future. And on that note…

The “Nick Saban’s Former Assistants Just Cannot Seem to Defeat Him” Thing – Saban is now 17-0 against his former assistants after they have become head coaches. I was tired of hearing about this back during SEC Media Days a few months ago. Imagine how un-delighted I was when being reminded of it over and over again during CBS’ broadcast of the game Saturday. Speaking of the CBS broadcast…

The CBS Announcing Team Over-Praising the Gamecocks for “Hanging Around” in the Game – I have to give Brad Nessler and Gary Danielson an “A” for effort in trying to find meaning in a game that was essentially over early in the third quarter. But I couldn’t help but feel a little embarrassed as they repeatedly praised the Gamecocks for not getting absolutely, totally crushed by a Tide team that actually did kind of totally crush them. This crew clearly expected to see South Carolina lose by 27 touchdowns on Saturday. Then again, how could you blame them?

The SEC’s Bizarre Scheduling System – This was the first time South Carolina had played Alabama since 2010 (which you might remember as being one of the most memorable Gamecock victories in the program’s history). They won’t play the Tide again for another five years. At this point, it’s almost like the schools aren’t even in the same conference anymore. Clemson has played SEC foes like Auburn far more times in recent years than the Gamecocks have. Once the Southeastern Conference added Missouri and Texas A&M to bring the league to 14 teams, scheduling went haywire to the point that we now barely see some of the SEC West teams at all. The conference either needs to schedule a ninth league game per season – as Tide coach Nick Saban has long advocated – or it needs to tinker with the cross-division format to allow every team to play one another within a few seasons. As it stands now, we play the North Carolina Tar Heels more often than we play several SEC teams.

Moral Victories – They don’t exist. Even if the offense plays well. We all need to keep reminding ourselves of this in the coming days. Also, when you lose by more than three touchdowns, you have forfeited any and all rights to claiming a moral victory.

So.

In my mind, the season really and truly begins now.

We’ve had one utter, unexpected meltdown that prompted a wholesale remaking of the team and the overall approach of the coaching staff, and that sent many of us wandering in the wilderness to contemplate the meaning of life and the nature of evil.

We’ve had two games (Charleston Southern and Alabama) where the outcome was essentially preordained before the ball was even kicked off.

Now South Carolina has a two-week stretch against evenly matched SEC opponents that they are fully and completely capable of winning or losing against. These are the games that truly matter in 2019.

As much as we’d all like for this to be 2012 and to be playing for New Year’s Day bowls and double-digit wins, the games that matter in 2019 are ones against Missouri and Kentucky and Tennessee.

Time to start the real season.