Scott Davis on South Carolina football: Autopsy of a collapse

Scott Davis has followed South Carolina athletics for over 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter year-round (sign up here) and a column during football season that’s published each Monday on GamecockCentral.com.

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How does it happen?

If you’ve watched college football long enough, you’ve seen it: A plucky underdog builds a surprising lead against a heavy favorite. They come out of the gates roaring, making plays they haven’t made all season, looking dominant in ways that defy rationality. The home crowd starts murmuring, shifting uncomfortably in their seats. What the hell is going on out there?

The upstarts force a turnover, connect on a long bomb. The home team makes a gaffe, then another, then another. And suddenly the lead has swelled and the fans are getting restless and the clock is ticking and all across the country, national media observers take note of the score and start firing off the tweets and the status updates and the hot takes. Is this really happening?

But you – the fan of the team that is currently shocking the world by winning – have an old, familiar, ugly feeling. You can’t trust the good vibes. You’ve seen this movie before, and you know how it ends, and you know the ending isn’t one where the main characters live happily ever after.

There are certain types of teams that always seem to fall apart in games like this, and your abiding fear is that your team is one of them.

And that old, familiar, ugly feeling is the one that South Carolina fans took with us into halftime on Saturday as we watched our perpetually snake-bitten team build a shocking 30-3 lead on the road in College Station against the undefeated No. 3 team in the nation.

Is 27 points enough? Is any amount of points ever enough? Will these next 30 minutes last forever?

At halftime, the text messages I was receiving from Gamecock friends and relatives were not celebratory, not jubilant. They spoke instead of bewilderment and a growing feeling of unease: We hadn’t planned on getting emotionally invested in this particular football game. Texas A&M entered the contest a whopping 19.5-point favorite at home. This was one we’d planned to merely glance at for a few minutes to let the universe know we still loved our guys and our school, and then carry merrily on with our Saturday.

Instead, South Carolina had this gravity-defying lead over the team that had arguably looked like the best team in the country in 2025, in arguably the most electric atmosphere in the sport. Now we had to pay attention whether we wanted to or not.

What happened next had the hazy, hallucinatory vibes of a dream. And yet it also felt as inevitable as the sunrise. The A&M offense instantaneously became unstoppable once the third quarter began, while the South Carolina offense became eminently stoppable. Aggie quarterback and Heisman Trophy candidate Marcel Reed emerged out of the locker room at halftime and suddenly looked every bit the part of an elite player, ripping passes into the tightest of windows, eluding surefire tackles, and causing every Gamecock fan with an Apple Watch to start getting AFib alerts every time he touched the football.

The Gamecock pass defense – stout all season long against lethal competition – was left shredded and exhausted before the third quarter was even halfway complete.

We’ve seen moments like this unfold before.

Big plays start coming with dizzying speed, and now it’s a 20-point game, and now your offense is heading back towards the sidelines in what seems like seconds, and…wait, when did it become a 13-point game? And now that electric home crowd is starting to wind up, and it feels like the very floor beneath your feet is collapsing, and it doesn’t take long, really, for the end to become complete.

Yes, we’ve seen it so many times before.

But how does it happen?

In part, it happens because you’re playing a great team with great players, and eventually those players are going to start doing great things. Texas A&M performed in that second half like the best team in the SEC, which means in the country.

And we can tip our caps to them and acknowledge their overwhelming excellence while also acknowledging that these things happen to teams like South Carolina because somewhere down deep, there’s a part of us that just doesn’t expect to see the Gamecocks winning games like this. And that feeling, that vibe, that aura then takes on a life of its own across the decades, consuming not just the fans but a long line of players and coaches, until it swallows up the program.

Can these things change? Can you eradicate this feeling? It is possible. It’s happened at other downtrodden programs. Indiana might win the Big 10 and the national championship this year. Oregon was not always a special program. The Florida Gators had never won the SEC before Steve Spurrier arrived.  

But to do it – to change the aura surrounding your program – something truly unexpected and almost magical has to happen. You have to win in unexpected moments. You have to finish. You have to do it a lot. And you have to keep doing it. Becoming a championship-level team has to happen incrementally, in small steps that build towards something greater.

Despite all of the Job-like misery that South Carolina fans have been forced to endure through the years, the most distressed and frustrated that I can ever remember us being was during the collapse of the Steve Spurrier Empire. Why then? Because we thought we’d finally broken through, finally fixed this thing.

We thought we’d changed the feeling. Weren’t 11-win seasons enough to transform the program, to take us to a place where we weren’t always the team blowing 27-point halftime leads?

No, they weren’t.

To truly break through, your program needs to win the SEC championship, not the Capital One Bowl. Championships are the only cure for curses and collapses. The South Carolina program was close under Spurrier, and close last year under Shane Beamer.

But a complete breakthrough hasn’t come.

And that’s why Gamecock fans still felt that old familiar feeling as they watched their team hold an eight-point lead with under three minutes in the fourth quarter against Alabama a few weeks ago, and why our feeling at halftime of the A&M game was one of fear rather than joy.

Is 27 points enough?

It was not.

The “This Offseason Can’t Get Here Fast Enough” Game Balls of the Week

THE INSIDERS FORUM: See what other Gamecock fans are saying about the collapse

For the entire length of that first half, it was starting to look like I’d actually be handing out real Game Balls to real South Carolina players for the first time in weeks. Then the second half arrived. Let’s give our one Ball to…

Wholesale Change – If there’s any benefit at all to frittering away a 27-point lead on the road to the best team in the SEC, it’s that the South Carolina program will now be forced to confront major change during the offseason to try to fix what happened in 2025. This is now officially the moment for bold decision-making, radical thinking and risk-taking. Good.

So many times across the decades, we’ve seen those administering the program patch over areas of concern with quick fixes and easy solutions. Under multiple coaching regimes, South Carolina has been the kind of place where an interim coach could, say, parlay a decent bowl game into a full-time coordinator role.

But with the Gamecocks 3-7 and out of bowl contention weeks before the end of the season, Shane Beamer will now likely have to spend the winter seeking genuinely fresh and innovative solutions to get this team back on track. That’s a good thing. He’s not wrong to point out how close the Gamecocks have been to breaking through in a number of tough contests this year – this team has indeed been competitive all season, and they’ve always played hard, despite a multitude of challenges.

Still, as Bill Parcells used to say, you are what your record says you are. And the record is 3-7.

Change is coming. It has to.

The Texas A&M Trooper Deflated Balls of the Week

THE INSIDERS FORUM: See what other Gamecock fans are saying about the collapse

We’ll try to keep this short. Let’s do this…

0-286 – The most devastating graphic I’ve ever encountered during a sports broadcast arrived at the bottom of my screen as the Aggies closed in on a go-ahead touchdown to come all the way back from 27 points behind. As the announcing team repeatedly referenced the number in ways that seemed increasingly hateful, it began to dawn on me what was being discussed: For more than 20 years in SEC football competition, no one had come back from a deficit that large to win a ballgame. Two hundred and eighty-six times previously that an SEC team had held a lead that large, that team came home with a victory. South Carolina, the 287th team on that list, did not.

A Texas A&M Trooper Inexplicably Shoving South Carolina’s Nyck Harbor in the Tunnel – Even LeBron James felt the need to weigh in on how ridiculous this moment was. In a weird way, its monumental ridiculousness summed up this entire 2025 season.

Just as they had against Alabama, South Carolina had a chance to resurrect the narrative of Shane Beamer as a Lazarus-like leader whose teams can never fully be counted out.

But after this collapse – which sealed a seventh loss – they can indeed be counted out, at least from the college football postseason. In a few short moments, the narrative shifted from Lazarus to 0-286. This is now, forevermore, the 0-286 Loss.

For us, it all felt too familiar.

For us, it was the worst South Carolina loss since…well, the one we just watched a few weeks ago against Alabama.

A collapse like this happens because we’ve seen it happen before, too many times.

And eventually, we start expecting it to.

Tell me how you’re feeling after the 0-286 Loss by writing me at [email protected].

THE INSIDERS FORUM: See what other Gamecock fans are saying about the collapse