Scott Davis: Season under pressure
Scott has followed South Carolina athletics for over 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter (sign up here) year-round and a column during football season that’s published each Monday on GamecockCentral.
I had a nightmare earlier this week.
My wife was out of town, and like I often do at this time of year, I’d screened a horror movie in the quiet darkness of my basement. I drifted off to sleep on the couch – apropos for a middle-aged man still pretending to be living in my old dorm room at South Carolina – and at some point, fell into a dream where I was walking through a forest.
In the dream, I turned a corner in the woods and encountered a vulture. The bird was completely gray, with no feathers, and had gleaming red eyes. I screamed, and the vulture screamed back, and then bit me on one of my ankles and dragged me up into the sky.
Then I woke up.
Saturday night, watching the South Carolina-Tennessee game from the den chair in my house, I briefly wondered if I was still sleeping.
Because the way I felt when I awoke on the couch after that vulture dream – huffing, puffing, terrified and desperate to see the sun rise again – is what I imagine South Carolina quarterback Spencer Rattler was feeling for much of four quarters inside the seething cauldron of Neyland Stadium.
Rattler spent the evening being harassed, hassled, and often sacked into the Tennessee turf by a ferocious Volunteer defensive front that was eager and ready to avenge the 2022 loss to the Gamecocks that had torpedoed their national title hopes. The Neyland crowd was more than ready to avenge that loss, too.
I’ve never seen the old stadium on the banks of the Tennessee River quite that electric.
This atmosphere was literally boiling. It bristled with evil, savage energy.
True, it’s always tough to play in Knoxville, especially at night. I’ve been to Neyland for South Carolina games several times, and I thought I’d seen it all there. I’ve seen the Gamecocks lose in excruciating fashion there (on multiple occasions). I’ve seen them win there. I’ve seen them get spanked there.
But what I was seeing through my television screen on Saturday night felt different. It felt primal. I’ve never seen the Knoxville faithful quite this hungry. It was a perfect example of a bloodthirsty SEC crowd imposing its will on a football game. They wanted this one. And they got it.
Rattler was sacked six times. It felt like 66.
And each time the Gamecocks hiked the football on offense, and those black-shirted Vols instantaneously erupted into the backfield, and Rattler started backpedaling and circling, that crowd got louder and louder and louder.
There was pressure on the field and pressure from the stands.
Sitting in the sanctity of my den chair in suburban Atlanta, I felt it in my head.
Pressure, pressure, pressure.
And when it was all over and the scoreboard read 41-20, Vols, the dream season that South Carolina fans had been waiting nine long months for in 2023 was under pressure, too.
David Bowie and Queen are now singing the soundtrack to this suddenly beleaguered season. (Here, take a listen).
At 2-3, the Gamecocks somehow need to find four wins the rest of the way just to get bowl-eligible in Shane Beamer’s third season at the helm. Awaiting them along the journey are the undefeated Kentucky Wildcats (who always seem to give them fits), a top-25 Missouri team that always seems to give them fits, and a top-25 Texas A&M team that always seems to give them fits, plus the Florida Gators and the Clemson Tigers.
It feels like the Gamecocks have been battling, fighting, and scrapping each week thus far in 2023. They put a powerful scare into the national champion Georgia Bulldogs on the road. They briefly led both Tennessee and North Carolina before fading in those games. And they showed flashes of explosiveness in defeating Mississippi State. This doesn’t seem like one of those seasons where we feel like we’re being sucked into a black hole, like the final year of the Will Muschamp Era did.
And yet, the stark reality is 2-3, with Kentucky, Missouri, A&M, Florida and Clemson remaining.
We waited and waited and waited for this dream season, all through the long winter months, through the spring and the summer, through all the practices and press conferences. Now it’s here and it’s racing by us, and we’re already floating into a bye week like lost wanderers in a lonely forest, wondering if there are vultures around the corner.
Pressure, pressure, pressure.
In the SEC, it never stops coming.
Will we come back from the week off ready to face that pressure, or will we wilt in the face of it instead?
However we respond to it, it will be coming.
It will never stop coming.
The Neyland Stadium Game Balls of the Week
If you’ve read this column in the past, you know that I’ve often given the Williams-Brice Stadium faithful Game Balls over the years. They’ve richly deserved it every time. But sometimes we forget there are other fan bases in this conference who are just as passionate and just as wild and just as charged with emotion as ours can be. That’s why it’s necessary to give our first Game Ball to…
Neyland at Night – That Tennessee crowd absolutely bludgeoned my hopes and dreams Saturday night. I was merely watching on television and wasn’t even in Knoxville, and yet I still felt like my body had been rotating on a spit inside a 500-degree oven after that one was over. I’ve attended games at most SEC stadiums, and by far the most intimidated I’ve ever felt was at Baton Rouge for an LSU night game, but I can’t imagine any setting anywhere being more barbaric than Neyland was for this one. On the one hand, it’s a credit to what Shane Beamer has brought to the South Carolina program that a peer fan base was this charged up for the Gamecocks’ arrival. On the other, South Carolina’s limp performance under the weight of that pressure serves as proof that the program hasn’t arrived at the place where Beamer hopes to eventually lead it.
Bye Weeks – You hate to view a Bye Week as a blessing after just five games, and yet I’m already ready for a breather even as October has barely dawned. You probably are, too. The injury-ravaged Gamecocks need to get well quickly for a brutal stretch run, and the fan base’s bruised spirit needs rejuvenation, too. If there’s anything at all we’ve learned from Beamer’s first two seasons in Columbia, it’s that you can’t close the curtain on a South Carolina season until it’s finished, and there’s always the possibility that the Gamecocks will deliver an unexpected and electrifying series of victories. We can only hope that history repeats itself the rest of the way.
South Carolina-Tennessee Deflated Balls
We could spend a very, very, verrrrrrrry long time here if we wanted to. Despite a powerful performance from the Volunteers and their supercharged crowd, there were enough mistakes, miscues, and missteps by the Gamecocks in this game to fuel a month’s worth of nightmares. Let’s pass out some Deflated Balls to…
Third Down – If you saw South Carolina’s offense facing a third down on Saturday night, your best option was to flip the channel over to the Ole Miss-LSU game. The Gamecocks were an atrocious 2-for-14 on third-down tries against Tennessee. As if that weren’t ugly enough, South Carolina misfired on three of its five fourth-down tries, too. With its defense being ground into dust by the Vol offense, it was critical for the Gamecocks to keep the offense on the field with sustained and steady drives – and time and time again they failed to do it.
Pick Six – Yikes. Down a touchdown and facing the near-impossibility of a third-and-22 opportunity as the first half wound towards a close, South Carolina chose to put the football in the air rather than sit on the ball and try their luck in the second half. You know the rest: Pressure, chaos, a floating football, an interception, a touchdown, a psychotic Neyland crowd, and a 14-point Volunteer lead at halftime that might as well have been a 75-point lead. I can’t remember a more devastating turnover in the last several seasons of South Carolina football.
Short-Yardage Simplicity – Whenever the Gamecock offense faced a short-yardage opportunity on third or fourth downs (which seemed to be often), the team’s approach suddenly became arch-conservative. South Carolina tried running up the middle, short-and-safe passes toward the sidelines, and quarterback sneaks into the teeth of the Volunteer front. None succeeded. It was an odd evening all around, as the Gamecocks seemed to bounce between a method that featured wild creativity and reckless abandon (mixing in a successful fake punt, for example) and 1950s-style basic football. The same team that attempted to sling the ball for a first down on third-and-22 at the end of the first half was also the same team that fruitlessly ran directly up the middle in multiple short-yardage situations.
Me Already Looking Forward to a Bye Week After Just Five Games – Did I really give a Game Ball to Bye Weeks? After just five games? Football is breaking me, man.
Vanilla Ice – Listening to the Queen/Bowie song “Under Pressure” just now reminded me that Vanilla Ice used that same bass line for “Ice, Ice Baby” a decade later. And now I can’t get the Vanilla Ice version out of my head. Come to think of it, maybe it is time for a Bye Week.
After an evening in the pressure cooker of Neyland Stadium, we all need a hibernation period.
The season we anticipated and hyped up and hoped for is here and it is passing us by, and the relentless pressure is growing by the minute.
How will we respond?
We’ll find out in two weeks.
Tell me what you think about South Carolina’s season under pressure by writing me at [email protected].
