Scott Davis: This Is Not a Test

Scott Davis has followed Gamecock sports for more than 30 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective.

He writes a weekly newsletter that's emailed each Friday. To sign up for the newsletter, click here. Following is the newsletter for Friday, Sept. 3, 2021.

Scott also writes a weekly column that appears on Gamecock Central during football season.

It happens to me every time.

In those last few minutes before the first game of a new football season, I’ll look around Williams-Brice Stadium, look at the band mustering near the tunnel, the cheerleaders milling around the sidelines, the fans filing into the stands, and I’ll have the weirdest thought.

Is this really happening?

It never quite seems real. The field – almost shockingly green – unfolds before me as if in a dream. The voice booming through the public address system seems to vibrate deep into my core, like a message from heaven. I can never quite believe my eyes or my ears.

Every human emotion is in play during those last few minutes before the first football game. The moment contains within it the solemn gravity of an emergency, the jubilant relief of high school graduation, the giddy anticipation of opening birthday gifts.

Joy, ecstasy, terror – it’s all there for you if you want it.

You see, for all of the time that we spend talking about football, and thinking about football, and reading about football practice, and arguing about recruiting and depth charts and the comings and goings of coaches, one dirty little secret often gets lost in the shuffle: Football isn’t here very much.

You get twelve Saturdays a year to do this thing. At best, just seven of those Saturdays will be spent at Williams-Brice Stadium. And no matter how much energy and angst and hope you invest into following this program, when it’s all said and done, that is all you are ever going to get.

Seven Saturdays per year in Williams-Brice.

Seven out of 52.

Twelve gamedays out of 365.

Almost all of the time, you are not in Williams-Brice Stadium watching South Carolina play football. Which is why when you finally make it back, after another drama-filled recruiting cycle and a steady-but-slow spring and an everlasting, lethally hot Palmetto State summer heading into the monthlong grind of August practices, you can’t quite believe you’ve lived to see another season.

Is this really happening?

On Saturday night in Columbia, it finally will be.

For most of us, it’s been awhile.

We’re a rusty group, we college football fans, wandering back into the friendly confines after more than nine months of an interminable offseason, plus whatever that strange COVID year was in 2020 that kept the vast majority of us away from the stadium.

Tens of thousands of us haven’t seen the inside of Williams-Brice since 2019. It’s been even longer since we strolled into the stadium with excitement or belief buzzing in our bellies.

And if you’re like me, you’re feeling a little out of shape.

As a fan, I wonder if I’ve lost a step, if I’m a little flabby, if my throat still hollers with force and vigor.

Do I still remember how to walk from the car to the gate? Can I make the rafters throb during “2001”? Can I drown out the “It’s another Carolina…FIRST DOWN!” Guy with psychotic cheering? Do I know, after all this time, how to order stale nachos and lukewarm bottled water from an inundated concessions station?

Do I belong in an SEC stadium or an old folks’ home?

These are the questions I’ve been pondering this week as the reality sinks in that this is not a test, that this is the real thing, that another season is here, that there is no going back now.

If I’m struggling to make it to Saturday night with my sanity and my marriage still intact, imagine what new head coach Shane Beamer’s week has been like.

For Beamer, this isn’t any given Saturday. This is the culmination of a life’s journey.

All those endless days on the practice fields as a position coach, all of those nights on the road recruiting, those evenings in a prospect’s living room trying to win the hearts and minds of moms and dads, those early mornings of film study, all of it across months and years and decades, all leading up to this moment, this opportunity to jog through the tunnel on Saturday under the lights as a head coach in the Southeastern Conference.

Any chance he’s sleeping for more than 15 minutes or so on Friday night?

What will it be like, that last moment he has to himself, that quiet period alone just before he steps on that field?

We hear things like this all the time: He’s been preparing for this moment his entire life.

This is one of the rare occasions when it’s actually true.

That’s why we shouldn’t forget how special moments like this are, how scarce and fleeting they are, how much they mean, how intensely we will remember them when they are over. Because they will be over, and they will be over fast, as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow.

Yes, there will eventually be another long offseason, another cold winter, another endless summer, recruiting, practice, more recruiting, more practice, more waiting.

But that’s another story for another time.

Right here and right now, the story we care about the most is just beginning.

It’s the one we’ve been waiting for.

We don’t need to know how it ends just yet. For now, we can simply breathe deeply, smile, greet each other again at the place that we love, the place that we share with each other, and be happy that the story is finally beginning to be told.

Tell me if you’re in game shape for Saturday nights at Williams-Brice by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.

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