Scott Davis: Fear the Malaise, a place no football fan wants to be

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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If you’ve been a Gamecock fan for longer than five minutes, you know what it feels like.

The Malaise.

It’s the place no SEC football fan ever wants to find themselves, and if you are an SEC football fan, you live in fear of the Malaise at all times. When you’re inside the Malaise, you’re drifting, spinning, unsure exactly where you are. You aren’t sure where your football program is, either.

It feels like you’re in Purgatory…but then again, you don’t know where you are. Your football team is good enough to occasionally show flashes, or like South Carolina, has been good enough recently enough that it seems like you haven’t yet fallen off a cliff. So you’re filled with questions.

Is the program just in a temporary rut? A valley before it climbs the mountain again? Have you simply reached a momentary stalemate, like every program does at some point or another – even the most successful ones? There will always be challenging periods when you just need to stay the course, grit your teeth and get through it.

Of course, there’s also the flipside: Are you already in No Man’s Land and just don’t know it yet?

That’s the Malaise.

The Malaise wears you out, exhausts you, and ultimately sucks away your passion. You still care – SEC football fans always care – but you find ways to distract yourself from the uncertainty.

In the Malaise, you find your attention wandering to other things besides football. You find yourself wishing the rest of your team’s games were on the road, so that you didn’t have to hear restless fans booing and clamoring every time your offense failed to pick up a first down. You find yourself saying things to friends like, “It’s just not happening this year, and I can’t let this stuff take up my entire Saturday for the rest of the fall.”

You haven’t yet reached that desperate, hellacious “let’s just burn this whole freaking thing to the ground and start over” phase, where anger has consumed you and the rest of the fan base. Ironically, that’s when fans are at their most locked in, most passionate, and most focused.

But the honeymoon’s definitely over, and you’re a little afraid to let yourself care too much.

And as I watched the Gamecocks drift listlessly through a ho-hum 26-7 home loss to Oklahoma on Saturday, I couldn’t help but wonder if we were there.

I hope not, and I’m not ready to declare that the Malaise has engulfed the South Carolina program. This football team still almost made the College Football Playoff as recently as last season. Shane Beamer has been a resurrection artist during his time in Columbia. This lost season might be a blip that we’ll have forgotten all about in five years.

Of course, that’s the problem with the Malaise: You never fully know if you’re in it until you’ve gone all the way through it and reached the Anger Phase.

I’ve written many times that the Beamer years have been the most entertaining in South Carolina football history. For better or worse, you couldn’t look away from the Gamecocks. Maybe they were exasperating you or stunning you with delight, but you had to pay attention.

But as the second half of the Oklahoma game wore on, I felt a twinge of that old, ugly feeling: I felt like I could indeed look away from South Carolina football, with stunning ease. The longer the Gamecocks were on the field, struggling to gain positive yardage on offense, the easier it became to flip the channel over to the LSU-Vandy game

Maybe you’re as old as I am, and you remember the waning years of the Lou Holtz Era in the 2000s. In hindsight, it seems clear that the program was fully and completely consumed by the Malaise by 2002. But South Carolina had just won consecutive Outback Bowls when that season started. And this was the legendary Lou Holtz! Surely the dream hadn’t already slipped away from us, had it?

So we drifted through a lifeless 2002 season, then drifted through an equally inert 2003 season, never fully realizing we were already in the cold grip of the Malaise. We just knew we were restless and worried, and we kept waiting – and waiting – for our doom to lift.

And it was not until the Gamecocks were curb-stomped at home 63-17 by their archrivals (still the most humiliating South Carolina defeat of my lifetime) to close the ’03 season that all of us came to the horrifying realization that the situation had become hopeless. The Malaise had already consumed us. It was over, and all that remained were details and logistics and another equally listless ’04 season that would be Holtz’s swan song.

I don’t make bold predictions or drop hot takes – I’m not an analyst, but just a fan who loves the University of South Carolina and wants it to succeed. I also want Shane Beamer to succeed. In fact, I’ve never wanted a South Carolina coach in any sport to succeed as much as I want him to, and not just because he’s coaching my team, but because I care about him personally. He’s earned that through the way he’s carried himself and the passion he’s displayed for our school and state.

But I also acknowledge reality, and thus my guess is that we’re not going to see this team playing in a bowl game this season, not with Ole Miss, Alabama, and Texas A&M still left on the schedule and four losses already in the books. My guess, if you’re forcing me to make one, is that this season is already at the bottom of the ocean.

And considering the expectations leading into this season for this program – when ESPN’s talking heads were contemplating the Gamecocks in the College Football Playoff and another Heisman Trophy coming to Columbia – a bowl-less finish would put this 2025 year squarely in the conversation for “One of the Most Disappointing Seasons of South Carolina Football Ever.”

What I don’t know is if this season will quickly fade to black, much like the 2023 season did after the 2024 Gamecocks restored order, won nine games, and beat Clemson, A&M, Missouri and Oklahoma. Or if something else, something darker, awaits us.

Maybe this program roars back to life next year, and we’ll pretend this never happened.

Or maybe…

You know what? Let’s figure all that out later.

The Taylor Swift Game Balls of the Week

DISCUSSION: See what other Gamecock fans are saying about the Oklahoma game

I wrote last week that because Taylor Swift was having a better October than the South Carolina Gamecocks, she would take over the namesake of our weekly Game Balls until further notice. As you can see, Ms. Swift is still listed on the marquee above. A Ball to…

Going For It on Fourth-and-38 Late in the Game – In the latter half of the fourth quarter of a game where they were trailing by three scores, the Gamecocks faced a fourth-and-38 proposition…and went for it. I was strangely happy to see this. Typically, coaches punt the ball in those situations because they know they’re going to lose the football game and simply don’t want to lose worse than they’re already losing. That attitude makes my skin crawl. Who cares if you lose by 17 or 24? It’s still a sound beatdown. Going for it right there showed me that Coach Beamer was sending a message to his players that they’d be trying to get a victory until the last second ticked off, no matter how hopeless this situation seemed. That’s a good thing.

It’s clear this loss took something out of Beamer. He was unusually short in his postgame press conference, even having a testy exchange with a reporter in which he dropped a “Next question” on the assembled media before launching into a brief monologue about the things that gave him hope for an offensive turnaround. All in all, it was about as prickly as you’ll ever see the typically upbeat coach, and another sign of the strain this season has placed on the team, its coaches, and its fans

The Blair Witch Project Deflated Balls of the Week

DISCUSSION: See what other Gamecock fans are saying about the Oklahoma game

In last week’s column, I compared the experience of watching South Carolina’s offense to that of watching a found footage horror movie in which nothing much happens for long stretches at a time. Friends, I’m sad to report that this movie is still playing. A Deflator to the following…

O-for-Third Down – As the third quarter neared its conclusion, the SEC Network announcing team spent an interminable stretch talking about how much South Carolina was struggling to convert third downs on offense. And with good reason. The Gamecocks had not yet converted one at that point in the football game, despite facing several short-yardage opportunities. While the announcers kept hammering the point home, a graphic ran along the bottom of the screen declaring that South Carolina currently ranked 105th in the FBS in third-down conversion rate. I’m no expert, but it seems like being 105th in something isn’t what you want to do.

The Running Game Being What We Thought It Was – Coach Beamer repeatedly pointed out in his postgame press conference last week that the Gamecocks had out-rushed LSU. Obviously, he was looking for positives to build upon, but the repeated references to the brief rushing success felt a little defiant considering that the team also lost to the Tigers by two scores.

And it didn’t carry over.

South Carolina struggled to rush for positive yards for the bulk of the game against Oklahoma, and it’s officially gotten painful to watch them try to fall forward for a yard or two in critical situations. Yes, OU has a great defense. Yes, South Carolina’s offensive line has been decimated by injuries.

But if you’re expecting to see this Gamecock team pick up a yard for a crucial first down right now, you’re going to be waiting a while. It’s been a short-yardage nightmare all season, and there’s little reason to believe that it’s going to get better. Speaking of which…

A Full-Blown Offensive Panic Has Consumed This Program’s Fan Base – If there’s any reason to believe the Malaise might already be upon us, it’s this: South Carolina will likely be on its fourth offensive coordinator in six years in 2026.

Finally Winning the Penalty War…and Still Getting Beaten Soundly – We’ve wondered all year long what this Gamecock team might look like if they could just clean up the silly, self-inflicted errors and play a tight football game. For the most part, that’s what happened Saturday…and South Carolina still lost at home by almost three touchdowns.

The Malaise – Are we already in it? I don’t even want to talk about this.

No matter what happens the rest of the way, it looks like it’s going to be an interesting offseason at South Carolina – but not the good kind of interesting. Barring a turnaround even more dramatic than the ones Beamer has already orchestrated, our hopes for seeing the program travel on the upward trajectory we thought it was on after last year have now evaporated.

So what’s next?

What we don’t know yet is if this is all temporary, like a bad dream where you wake up relieved that nothing you thought you were experiencing was real.

Or whether it’s something worse, one of those moments where you realize, with increasing horror, that this is not a dream at all.

This is real life.

Tell me what you think after a disappointing loss to Oklahoma by writing me at [email protected].

DISCUSSION: See what other Gamecock fans are saying about the Oklahoma game