Scott Davis: Flush this season right down the toilet

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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Gosh, I’m glad it’s over. Aren’t you?

It feels like I just lost 40 pounds. It feels like I’ve just been released from the hospital after being bedridden for three months with a full-body rash. It feels like I can breathe again.

Our long national nightmare is over.

This 2025 South Carolina football season – inarguably one of the most disappointing in program history – has ended. If I don’t want to, I never have to think about it again. I could, if I chose to do so, simply flush this season right down the toilet.

Friends, I plan to try doing just that.

The moment that triple-zeros hit the clock on South Carolina’s utterly inevitable 28-14 defeat to a five-loss Clemson, I had a flashing thought that filled me with utter joy: I get to wake up next Saturday and not watch a football game.

If only I’d realized that option was available to me back in September.

This season felt like a weeks-long siege – food and water had been cut off, supplies never arrived, reinforcements weren’t coming. All that was left for us to do was starve, week by week.

Once it became clear to many of us that our preseason College Football Playoff dreams had been deeply misguided, and indeed that our expectations for even seeing South Carolina play in a forgettable bowl game for the holidays were vanishing by the minute, and that our archrivals up the road were enduring their worst season in 20 years, the drumbeat started to build.

You better at least get Clemson this year.

Surely South Carolina would finally put a semblance of a complete performance together in the season finale, right? Somewhat astonishingly, the Gamecocks hadn’t won at home against their rivals since Steve Spurrier was roaming the sidelines back in 2013. In a lost, forgettable season, the universe would at least give us this, wouldn’t it?

It would not.

As they have all year, under multiple offensive coordinators and against defenses ranging from excellent to decent to nothing special, the South Carolina offense simply couldn’t put enough points on the board to close out a winnable football game. As they have all year, the Gamecocks arrived at the doorstep of the fourth quarter with a victory in sight…and they walked back to the locker room empty-handed.

As they have all year, they had their chances and they did not seize them.

Unlike the rest of us, Coach Shane Beamer and his staff won’t have the blissful option to flush this season right down the toilet.

They’ll need to immerse themselves in it all over again during the next few weeks and months. They’ll be required to start trying to figure out what happened and why, how a promising campaign turned so ugly so quickly, how things began to unravel and why no one involved could find an answer for stopping the meltdown.

There will be monumental decisions to make: Who will be the next offensive coordinator, which players on the roster are staying or going, does this team still have a starting quarterback – and if not, who’s the next man up?

Through it all, this team played hard each week and was made up of likable kids who never mailed it in, which only made the endless collapse even more painful to watch. In years past, a dark wave of negativity would have infected the South Carolina locker room over the course of a season like this. That it never happened in 2025 is a testament to the culture Beamer has worked hard to build since arriving in Columbia.

But after yet another home loss to a mediocre Clemson, a 4-8 finish and a 1-7 record in the SEC, there’s no way to soften the storyline: This is a challenging road ahead for Beamer and his staff, and the odds will be against them.

The national media – poised to anoint Beamer as a young superstar back in August – relishes tearing down its chosen ones just as much as it enjoys building them up. When the 2026 preseason chatter begins next summer, you won’t be hearing ESPN and SEC Network analysts talking up the South Carolina Gamecocks.

These are the times that try men’s souls, as Thomas Paine wrote.

Shane Beamer was brought to South Carolina at the end of 2020 because he was able to convince the program’s administrators that he had a plan for turning this thing around.

Now, five years later, the most difficult stretch of his journey here has just begun.

As for the rest of us, we can just flush this season. Pretend it never happened.

There may be a time when I’ll be ready to learn more about the new OC possibilities, to dive into the roster realignment, to talk to other fans about what 2026 might bring.

But for me, that time is not right now.

Right now, I feel like I’ve been starving for the last three months.

And I’m ready to eat again.

The “Thank God the 2025 Football Season is Finally Over” Game Balls of the Week

When you lose for the sixth straight time at home to your archrival, and that archrival isn’t a particularly good football team, there’s only one Game Ball to be handed out, and that goes to…

The 2025 Football Season Finally Being Over – A couple of weeks ago, after South Carolina’s epic collapse against Alabama (which wouldn’t end up even being the team’s worst collapse of the season), I wrote that the 2025 season looked likely to end up in the conversation for one of the most disappointing South Carolina football seasons of all time. To my unending surprise, this opinion wound up becoming mildly controversial amongst the fan base.

What seemed to be happening was that many fans mistook “one of the most disappointing seasons ever” to mean “one of the worst South Carolina football teams ever.” So let’s go ahead and clear this up, then never talk about this again.

This 2025 South Carolina team was not anywhere near being in the conversation for one of the worst Gamecock football squads of all time. Not even close. Nowhere near.

In my lifetime, South Carolina has turned out a winless 0-11 team, a 1-10 team, a 2-8 team and whole heaping helping of teams that struggled more consistently, more comprehensively and more discouragingly than this particular team ever thought about doing.

On the other hand, the 2025 Gamecocks competed every week, played at least well enough to have a chance to win most of their games, and never embarrassed themselves against a brutal schedule that would have tested just about anyone.

So why was this one of the most disappointing seasons ever?

Because to be disappointed, you have had expectations in the first place. For your hopes to be dashed, you first had to actually have hope.

I expected next to nothing from any of those woebegone Gamecock teams mentioned above. Most everyone in the country thought those teams would range anywhere from mediocre to terrible, and in their heart of hearts, most Gamecock fans did, too.

But this 2025 team?

You may have trouble remembering it now, and I don’t blame you if you do, but South Carolina was a trendy pick among the national media to contend for the College Football Playoff this year. This wasn’t typical Gamecock fan preseason hype. This was a steady narrative being generated by ESPN, the SEC Network and analysts across the country.

LaNorris Sellers started the season as one of the two or three most important figures in the sport, a favorite for finishing in the Heisman Trophy running, and a potential No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft. The biggest question surrounding Shane Beamer was not whether South Carolina would retain him for 2026, but whether the university would be able to fend off other suitors for his services in the future.

Whether you doubted this team’s capacity for winning the SEC or not (and many readers have rushed to assure me in recent weeks that they never fell for the propaganda), quite a few trusted observers believed.

There have been many South Carolina teams over the course of my lifetime that Gamecock fans have built unreasonable expectations for during the preseason. But there has never been one as hyped nationally as loudly and as emphatically as this one was.

Given that background, to go 4-8, finish 1-7 in the SEC, fail to make even a lower-tier bowl, lose to your archrival during one of its worst seasons in memory, watch as your offensive coordinator is released during the season, endure a historic second-half collapse against Texas A&M that defied rationality…I mean, how could it be possible that this isn’t one of the most disappointing seasons in program history?
What could I possibly be missing?

Regardless, I think we can all agree that it’s a beautiful thing to watch this season fade to black at last.

It’s officially over, and I plan to flush it.

And if one flush doesn’t do the job, I’ll flush it again. And I’ll keep flushing until it’s gone.

Let it be known far and wide: I’m never thinking or talking about the 2025 South Carolina football season again.

But for Shane Beamer and the South Carolina athletic administration, the thinking, the talking, and the soul-searching have only just begun.

May the Lord bless and keep them.

Tell me what you think about this season by writing me at [email protected].

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