Scott Davis: Closing time comes too soon
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.
Ever been inside a lively bar in those final, few ecstatic moments before last call?
The music’s thumping. The drinks are flowing. The noise level is so high that you have to scream at the person next to you just to make conversation. And you’re feeling goooooooood.
At that moment, the night seems like it could last forever. You’re supercharged and anything seems possible. Maybe you’ll order a pizza and eat the entire thing yourself. Maybe you’ll go for a 10-mile walk just to say you did it. Maybe you’ll ask the house band if you can step in at lead vocal for a few tunes…and they’ll let you.
Everything in the world is on the table.
And then it happens.
The overhead lights come up. The music stops with a kind of terrifying immediacy. Silence swallows the place alive as somebody somewhere yells, “Bar’s closed!” You struggle to adjust your eyes to the awful glare while the rest of the dazed crowd starts shuffling toward the exits. And you’re standing there, stunned, wondering how it all happened so quickly.
Now there’s nothing left in front of you except a fitful night’s sleep. And tomorrow morning’s hangover.
That’s the feeling South Carolina fans like me had on Saturday evening as the unheralded Missouri Tigers nonchalantly waltzed into Williams-Brice Stadium and let the air out of a very large balloon that we had all been excitedly filling with helium for the last few weeks.
Mizzou, sleepwalking into this game at 3-4 after struggling mightily to subdue Vanderbilt last week, took home an easygoing, no-doubt-about-it 23-10 win that seemed just short of astonishing to those of us who had just watched Texas A&M wilt under the Cockpit’s lights a mere week earlier.
We’d had just a couple of weeks to enjoy what felt like a tentative return to something resembling relevance, and with Missouri and Vanderbilt up next on the schedule, we wanted more, more, more. Instead, we got one of those mystifying, head-scratching, “what just happened?” games that South Carolina fans like us seem doomed to encounter for as long as we walk this earth. Cue the dry heaves.
After a lifetime of following this program, you’d think I’d be accustomed to losses like these – losses that stop the party dead in its tracks.
Let’s pause for a trip down Memory Lane, shall we? When I was a student at South Carolina, the Gamecocks went on the road to Baton Rouge and won a game at LSU to get themselves to 4-1, and with a couple of winnable games coming up, the program seemed ready for a long-awaited breakthrough in the SEC.
I celebrated the moment by descending into a jubilant Five Points, and at one of the joyous evening’s many stops, spotted a friend of mine across the bar. He ran towards me screaming, “The road to the SEC East title runs through Columbia!” Do I even need to finish the story? Almost inevitably, the Gamecocks lost their next two games at home to the likes of East Carolina and Mississippi State, and that was that.
In other words, I’ve seen it all before. I’ve done a lot of seeing it all. You have, too.
But you never get used to those overhead lights coming up, do you?
You never get used to the music stopping, the abrupt and breathtaking silence, the end of a good night that shuts down just when things were getting fun.
You never get used to closing the tab and walking home alone.
Now, the hope and the promise that seemed ours for the taking just a week ago has evaporated along with all the helium in the hype balloon, and we’re all left feeling a little deflated with four games to go (three of them on the road).
It seems amazing that just a few days ago, I was having actual, real-life conversations with friends in which I blurted out absurdities like, “If we can take care of Mizzou and Vandy, all the sudden you’re 7-2 going to Gainesville, and the Gators aren’t that good, and if you win there, doesn’t College GameDay have to come to the Horseshoe for South Carolina-Tennessee?”
Instead, this upcoming Vanderbilt game now suddenly looms as a type of “you better get it done here if you want to go to a bowl game in 2022” make-it-or-break-it contest to salvage what’s left of the season in Nashville.
So here we are again.
The lights are up. The tab awaits. And no matter how many times it comes, we will never be ready when the last call sounds.
The Christie Davis South Carolina-Missouri Game Balls of the Week
In one of the most memorable runs of the 2021 season, my wife Christie held the honor of namesake for the weekly Game Balls during an awe-inspiring stretch early last year. Part of this, we must admit, was due to the reality that no individual Gamecock was doing quite enough good things on the field to seize the mantle from her.
But let’s give credit where it’s due – Mrs. Davis also simply overwhelmed her competitors by always making the games more fun to watch, delivering a scathing series of one-liners that kept me chuckling even during outright debacles like last season’s Texas A&M game. All I can tell you is this: Thank God she was sitting next to me during the Missouri game this weekend. Let’s hurl a Christie in the direction of…
Christie Davis – As the SEC Network cameras panned across the slouching form of Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz (looking astoundingly pleased with himself at that particular moment), my wife appropriately noted, “He has a very punchable face.” I’d just been thinking the same thing and said so.
Later, after another long shot of Drinkwitz, she said, “I’m almost positive he spray-tans. There’s just not that much sunlight in Missouri.” Fair point.
And my heart swelled with joy later when, after the SEC Network’s unlistenable analyst Matt Stinchcomb droned on for an interminable stretch, she suddenly shouted, “Mute these guys right now!” I think we all felt that way. Just a virtuoso performance by the young lady.
South Carolina-Missouri Deflated Balls
I mean, we could be here all week with these if we wanted to be. But what will that accomplish? Let’s just hand out a necessary few and move on to Vanderbilt. Sound good? Good.
The Nausea-Inducing Knowledge That We’re Now Facing an Uncertain Off-Season Filled With Endless Questions About the Future of South Carolina’s Offense – Other than quarterback controversies, nothing makes being a college football fan less fun than being forced to follow the often rage-filled conversations about a troubled coordinator on the coaching staff. I’m probably not breaking any news when I acknowledge that many Gamecock fans have struggled to connect with offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield since he arrived on campus under Shane Beamer.
Even while the Gamecocks were putting the finishing touches on a monumental win over Texas A&M last week, many of the fans in the Williams-Brice stands around me were expressing a rather colorful level of dissatisfaction with the play-calling on offense (a factoid I conveniently left out of my insistently ecstatic column from that game).
And it’s true that the Gamecocks’ two-game SEC winning streak over a couple of monkeys on the back masked the reality that South Carolina just isn’t fielding a potent (or even consistent, or even interesting) offense right now, despite appearing to have at least some weapons on that side of the ball. After a gruesome 203-total-yard, 10-point, punt-happy offensive performance at home against Missouri, that colorful level of dissatisfaction is likely to rise to the level of outright noise pollution. Get ready for several long weeks of “what are we going to do at offensive coordinator” chatter.
South Carolina’s Missouri Problem – If South Carolina ever wants to be taken seriously in the SEC again, then the Gamecocks absolutely have to start winning more than they lose against lower-middle-class league competitors like Missouri. Instead, Mizzou has suddenly won four straight against the Gamecocks, and they’ve done it even during seasons in which they weren’t doing much else to brag about. Forget about beating Georgia. Beat Missouri, for God’s sake.
The “Hey, South Carolina’s Back in the Top 25!” Storyline Lasting for Five Seconds – That was fun while it lasted.
Just About Everything I Did As a Fan Over the Last Week Despite the Fact That I’ve Been Following This Program for Decades and Have Seen Losses Like This Since the Beginning of Time – I started the week by writing a column in which I compared the atmosphere at Williams-Brice Stadium last Saturday night to something resembling a religious experience. Then I started having those ridiculous “if we get by Mizzou and Vandy, all the sudden we’re 7-2 and…” conversations with friends (always a deadly indicator that your season is about to fall lifeless in the blink of an eye). I even gave some serious thought to whether my wife and I might attend South Carolina’s bowl game this year, depending on where and when it was.
Folks, I’ve been watching this program for nearly 40 years. What in God’s name had gotten into me?
I think that, like many of you, I was wildly desperate for good news after everything we’ve been through over the last decade. I clung to whatever good news I could find. I sucked it down into my core. And I tuned out bad news.
Sure, I knew Kentucky’s starting QB was injured when we played the Wildcats, and I knew Texas A&M was mighty young all along its roster, and I was aware that South Carolina had been winning without much in the way of offensive production and using special teams and smoke and mirrors, and I knew all the realities and all the cold hard truths, but didn’t this team have a whiff of magic lingering about it?
Didn’t it?
Still, on Saturday morning before the Missouri game, I came dangerously close to pressing “send” on a text message to a friend in which I wondered whether I’d allowed myself to become too invested in this particular South Carolina team. Ultimately, I didn’t send it, but the fact that I almost did so after one of the biggest Gamecock wins in recent memory meant something doubtful was already brewing in my chest. By the time kickoff came around, I had admitted to myself that I was dreading something.
I didn’t know what I was dreading, but it was something.
Now I know.
I was dreading closing time.
Because closing time always, always, always comes.
And somehow, even after all these years, I am never, ever expecting it.
Tell me what you think about the rest of the season by writing me at [email protected].
