Scott Davis: Battling the blowout blues
Scott Davis has followed the South Carolina football program for more than 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective each Monday during the season. Scott also writes a weekly newsletter that’s emailed each Friday; sign up here to receive it.
Like I do almost every morning, I woke up on Sunday and took a long walk through the vast subdivisions that surround my home in suburban Atlanta.
And for the first time since last winter, I bundled up in gloves, a ski cap and a thick puffer jacket. Fortunately, I’d glanced at the temperatures before heading out: Thirty-four degrees. Winter wasn’t just coming. Winter was here.
I passed a guy walking his dog into a stiff breeze. He was wrapped in a scarf and looked up at me, shivering, just to say, “Finally got some cold weather, didn’t we?”
Yes, we sure did, my friend. We got cold weather in more ways than one.
You want some cold weather? For South Carolina fans, watching the Gamecocks get rolled up, ravaged and routed 38-6 on Saturday afternoon by a previously mediocre Florida team was the equivalent of stepping into an ice-cold shower and staying there for three hours. It was an emotional and spiritual Polar Bear Plunge. It was like taking the Ice Bucket Challenge…endlessly, again and again and again.
Whatever spark, whatever momentum, whatever juice seemed to be flowing through the program after the Gamecocks secured a second consecutive season of bowl eligibility with a win at Vanderbilt was sucked away into an icy, swirling wind.
If, as expected, South Carolina loses out in its next two games to close the regular season at 6-6, they’ll finish with the exact same record with which they finished the 2021 regular season. But almost certainly, Gamecock fans won’t be entering this off-season with the same upbeat feelings and warm, positive vibes they took into the winter last year.
In college football, perception often becomes reality. And last season, our hopes soared because the team ended the year with an unexpected surge, scoring wins over longtime bullies Florida and Auburn, then punctuating it all by drilling North Carolina in a bowl game. In the here and now, South Carolina is unequivocally limping to the finish line, and this version of 6-6 would feel a great deal worse than it did 12 months ago.
When the Gamecocks are utterly and entirely uncompetitive – as they were Saturday, and as they were early in the season against Georgia – it’s almost impossible for longtime fans like me to ward off thoughts of the past, our minds drifting back to the days of Sparky Woods and Brad Scott and even Lou Holtz, to the days when Gamecock football got its doors blown off by SEC foes often and with numbing efficiency.
Blowouts like the one we saw this weekend provide a nauseating reminder of those many seasons when we watched this team get overwhelmed again and again. Those reminders can be deadly to a program’s progress, especially if they are followed by still more blowouts and uncompetitive Saturdays. The bad news? Your next two opponents are Tennessee and Clemson.
Blowouts are momentum killers in almost every way possible.
They can stop a good season cold in its tracks. They can make players start wondering if the coaches are utilizing them properly, and make coaches start wondering if the plays they’re drawing up just don’t work anymore, and make Gamecock fans start wondering if this is 1998 again (which is the absolute last thing anyone associated with the program wants us to be doing).
That’s why it’s critical for South Carolina to at least show signs of life – to display some ability to stand and fight – in these last two regular season games in which they will be heavy underdogs. We want to see this team punch back when it gets smacked in the face. We want to see them hang around for a quarter or two rather than finding themselves down three touchdowns before the first quarter’s even gotten going.
I don’t think we’re asking for the sun, moon and stars by asking for those things.
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Almost every reasonable Gamecock fan I know would have taken another 6-6 season and a bowl berth if given the opportunity to do so before the 2022 season started. Most of us knew this team wasn’t ready to contend for a spot in the SEC Championship Game, or even for a New Year’s Day bowl.
But we do want to see our team compete, come what may.
We do want to avoid the embarrassments and humiliations that remind us of the bad old years.
And it’s actually possible to do that.
Just look up the road towards Knoxville. Tennessee – another SEC program in the second year of a presumed rebuilding project – managed to avoid just such an impending embarrassment and humiliation in the Vols’ game last week against defending national champion Georgia. The Bulldogs, playing at home in front of a bloodthirsty crowd, were on the cusp of running UT out of Sanford Stadium early. But the overmatched Volunteers never quite let the contest fall completely into the abyss, and they scrapped and struggled and ultimately left Athens on the losing end of a modest 27-13 result that allowed them to hold their heads up and move forward (which they immediately did with Saturday’s 66-24 curb-stomping of Missouri).
In recent seasons, going back to the Will Muschamp Era in Columbia, South Carolina, has often failed to show that kind of resolve during games that are slipping away quickly. The Gamecocks’ matchup against UGA earlier this year was cooked before the first quarter ended, as was this weekend’s game in Gainesville (and let’s not even recall last season’s games against Texas A&M and Clemson).
And when games are already over before halftime, and it’s happening more than once a season, the bad old years start seeming uncomfortably close for South Carolina fans.
Most of us are prepared to be patient during a rebuilding process. We know where the program stood after the 2-8 nuclear meltdown of 2020. We know this is a steep climb, and we know we won’t reach the summit this year, and probably not next year, either. We know Shane Beamer is the right fit at South Carolina, and we know he’s brought an infectious energy that had been sorely missing for too long inside the football building.
We even know that programs like Tennessee are in a different place than we are athletically, even though they are also in the second year of a new coach’s tenure, and thus apples-to-apples comparisons are difficult to make.
We know all of it.
But we do want to see our team compete.
And with every blowout we watch, those ugly memories of the bad old days whirl back in on a cold, icy wind.
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The Pete Lembo Game Balls of the Week
There is precisely one coordinator on the South Carolina coaching staff whose unit is not currently incinerating the hopes and dreams of Gamecock fans everywhere. And that coach is Special Teams Coordinator Pete Lembo. Congratulations, coach. Let us toss a Game Ball in the direction of…
South Carolina’s Special Teams Play in 2022 – It’s unclear how many games this team would actually have won in 2022 were it not for the contributions of its special teams unit. Inevitably, the special teams were the only bright spot for the Gamecocks on Saturday, as punter Kai Kroeger threw for a touchdown on a fake punt and South Carolina blocked a Florida field goal. At this point, I feel comfortable watching the Gamecocks punt, line up to kick a field goal and kick the ball off to start the game or the second half. Annnnnnnd…that’s about the only time I feel comfortable watching them.
The Drawing Board – How could we fail to give a Game Ball to the Drawing Board this week? It’s the only destination awaiting the South Carolina Gamecocks right now and the one place they must retreat back to after the ugliest of Saturdays in Gainesville has cast a shadow on the entire 2022 season.
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South Carolina-Florida Football Deflated Balls
Every now and then, you run into a buzzsaw and face a team that is simply more talented than you are and is firing on all cylinders the day you face them. That happened when the Gamecocks played Georgia earlier this season. This wasn’t one of those games. This Florida team has played a little better in recent weeks, particularly offensively, but they’re still the same team that lost by 10 points to Kentucky this year, won by just a field goal against a South Florida squad that is 1-9 thus far, and had posted four losses entering the game Saturday. The Gators – playing under a first-year head coach – were favored against South Carolina at home, and it was anything but shocking that they won the football game. But 38-6? Florida leading by three touchdowns just minutes after opening kickoff? If you’re wondering how a blowout comes to fruition, here’s how.
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Penalty Party – We may just make “Penalties” a permanent entry in the Deflated Balls section until further notice. I don’t care what the final season statistics end up saying: This South Carolina team feels like the most penalized Gamecock squad of my lifetime. A week after collecting 12 flags against Vanderbilt, the Gamecocks stockpiled 11 more against the Gators. An excellent way to ensure being blown out is to become the most penalized team on the planet. Here’s another…
Turnovers – Fumbling the football on three of your first four offensive plays of the second half is a very powerful, very effective method for ensuring a blowout. Let there be no doubt about this.
South Carolina’s Suddenly Struggling Run Defense – Was a Deflated Ball entry last week, but I think we can officially remove the “Suddenly” description because the Gamecock defense now appears firmly entrenched in its inability to stop the run. The Gators ran wild for a staggering 374 yards, and Florida’s offense held the ball for more than 36 minutes. Meanwhile, the injury-depleted Gamecocks rushed for 44 yards. Forty-four yards.
South Carolina’s Big Wins in 2022 – Remember when we were all vibrating with ecstasy after that two-game winning streak against Kentucky and Texas A&M? Those teams had tormented the Gamecocks in recent seasons, and in the moment, defeating both of them consecutively felt like a powerful statement about the future of the South Carolina program. Then the Gamecocks unceremoniously lost at home to a middling Mizzou, while the wins against the Wildcats and Aggies have grown more unimpressive almost by the second. Kentucky lost on Saturday to Vanderbilt to officially slip out of the Top 25 and collect its fourth loss of the year. As for Texas A&M, the Aggies are in the midst of their worst losing streak in more than four decades. They lost to struggling Auburn Saturday to clinch a losing season without a bowl appearance. Of South Carolina’s six wins in ’22, none now qualify as particularly noteworthy.
So what does it all mean? It means that football seasons, like the weather, can change overnight, and the thermometer readings are rapidly sinking on what once seemed like a promising 2022 for the South Carolina Gamecocks.
There are two games left. And most of us know those two games probably aren’t going to be victories.
But we do want to see the Gamecocks compete.
And that is not asking for the sun, the moon or the stars.
Tell me how you’re handling the Blowout Blues by writing me at [email protected].
